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SOCIAL LIFE AT EOME 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



m THE AGE OF CICERO 



BY 



W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. 

FELLOW A»D LBCTUREB OF LIKOOLN COLLEGE, OXPOBD 

ATJTHOE OP 'the CITY-STATE OP THE GREEKS AND ROMANS,' 

' THB SOMAN FESTIVALS OF THE PERIOD OF THE SEPUBLIO,' ETC. 



' Ad ilia mihi pro se qnisque acriter intendat animum, 
quae vita, quae mores fuerint.' — LivT, Praefatio. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1909 

AU rights reserved 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

FEB 17 m9 

_, Copyritrnt Entry 
CLASS a_ XXc. No. 

COPY a. 



J 



COPTEIGHT, 1909, 

bt the macmillan company. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1909. 



Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



AMICO VETERRIMO 

I. A. STEWAET 

ROMAB PEIMUM VISAB 

COMBS MBMOR 

D. D. D, 






PEEFATOEY NOTE 

This book was originally intended to be a companion 

to Professor Tucker's Life in Ancient Athens, pub- 
lished in Messrs. Macmillan's series of Handbooks of 
Archaeology and Art ; but the plan was abandoned 
for reasons on which I need not dwell, and before 
the book was quite finished I was called to other and 
more specialised work. As it stands, it is merely 
an attempt to supply an educational want. At our 
schools and universities we read the great writers of 
the last age of the Eepublic, and learn something of 
its political and constitutional history ; but there is 
no book in our language which supplies a picture of 
life and manners, of education, morals, and religion 
in that intensely interesting period. The society of 
the Augustan age, which in many ways was very 
different, is known much better ; and of late my 
friend Professor Dill's fascinating volumes have 
familiarised us with the social life of two several 
periods of the Eoman Empire. But the age of Cicero 
is in some ways at least as important as any period 
of the Empire ; it is a critical moment in the history 

of Graeco-Eoman civilisation. And in the Ciceronian 

vii 



viii SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

correspondence, of more than nine hundred contem- 
porary letters, we have the richest treasure-house of 
social life that has survived from any period of 
classical antiquity. 

Apart from this correspondence and the other 
literature of the time, my mainstay throughout has 
been the Privatleben der Homer of Marquardt, 
which forms the last portion of the great Handhuch 
der Romischen Altertumer of Mommsen and Mar- 
quardt. My debt is great also to Professors Tyrrell 
and Purser, whose labours have provided us with a 
text of Cicero's letters which we can use with 
confidence ; the citations from these letters have all 
been verified in the new Oxford text edited by 
Professor Purser. One other name I must mention 
with gratitude. I firmly believe that the one great 
hope for classical learning and education lies in the 
interest which the unlearned public may be brought 
to feel in ancient life and thought. We have just 
lost the veteran French scholar who did more perhaps 
to create and maintain such an interest than any 
man of his time ; and I gladly here acknowledge that 
it was Boissier's Ciceron et ses amis that in my 
younger days made me first feel the reality of life 
and character in an age of which I then hardly knew 
anything but the perplexing political history. 

I have to thank my old pupils, Mr. H. E. Mann 
and Mr. Gilbert Watson, for kind help in revising 
the proofs. 

W. W. F. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

TAOta 

Topographical ...... 1-23 

Virgil's hero arrives at Rome by the Tiber : we follow his 
example, 1 ; justification of this, 2 ; view from Janiculum 
and its lessons, 4 ; advantages of the position of Rome, for 
defence and advance, 5 ; disadvantages as to commerce 
and salubrity, 7 ; views of Roman writers, 9 ; a walk 
through the city in 50 B.C., 12 ; Forum Boarium and 
Circus maximus, 13 ; forta Capena, 14 ; via Sacra, 16 ; 
summa sacra via and view of Forum, 17 ; religious build- 
ings at eastern end of Forum, 19 ; Forum and its buildings 
in Cicero's time, 19 ; ascent to the Capitol, 20 ; temple of 
Jupiter and the view from it, 21. 

CHAPTER H 

The Lower Population .... 24-59 

Spread of the city outside original centre, 24 ; the plebs dwelt 
mainly in the lower ground, 25 ; little known about its life : 
indifference of literary men, 27 ; housing : the insulse, 28 ; 
no sign of home life, 29 ; bad condition of these houses, 30 ; 
how the plebs subsisted, 32 ; vegetarian diet, 32 ; the corn 
supply and its problems, 34 ; the corn law of Gains Gracchus, 
36; results, and later laws, 3'7 ; the water-supply, 39; 
history of aqueducts, 40 ; employment of the lower grade 
population, 42 ; aristocratic contempt -for retail trading, 
43 1 the trade gilds, 45 ; relation of free to slave labour, 
47 ; bakers, 49 ; supply of vegetables, 49 ; of clothing, 51 ; 
of leather, 53 ; of iron, etc., 54 ; gave employment to large 
numbers, 55 ; porterage, 55 ; precarious condition of labour, 
56 ; fluctuation of markets, 56 ; want of a good bankruptcy 
law, 57. 

ix 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



CHAPTER III 

PA0E3 

The Men op BtrsiNESS and their Methods . . 60-96 

Meaning of equester ordo, 60 ; how the capitalist came by his 
money, 62 ; example of Atticus, 63 ; incoming of wealth 
after Hannibalic war, 65 ; suddenness of this, 68 ; rise of a 
capitalist class, 69 ; the contractors, 70 ; the public contract- 
ing companies, 71 ; in the age and writings of Cicero, 73 ; 
their political influence, 74 ; and power in the provinces, 
76 ; the bankers and money-lenders, 80 ; origin of the 
Koman banker, 81.; nature of his business, 82 ; risks of the 
money-lender, 84 ; general indebtedness of society, 85 ; 
Cicero's debts, 86 ; story of Rabirius Postumus, 90 ; mischief 
done by both contractors and money-lenders, 94, 

CHAPTER IV 
The Governing Aristocracy .... 97-134 

The old noble families, 97 ; their exclusiveness, 99 ; Cicero's 
attitude towards them, 99 ; new type of noble, 101 ; Scipio 
Aemilianus : his "circle," 104; its influence on the Ciceronian 
age in (1) manners, 106 ; (2) literary capacity, 109 ; (3) 
philosophical receptivity, 113 ; Stoicism at Rome, 114 ; its 
influence on the lawyers, 117 ; Sulpicius Rufus, his life and 
work, 118 ; Epicureanism, its general effect on society, 121 ; 
case of Calpurnius Piso, 123 ; pursuit of pleasure and neglect 
of duty, 124 ; senatorial duties neglected, 125 ; frivolity of 
the younger public men, 127 ; example of M. Caelius Rufus, 
127 ; sketch of his life and character, 128 ; life of the Forum 
as seen in the letters of Caelius, 131. 

CHAPTER V 
Marriage and the Koman Lady . . . 135-167 

Meaning of matrimonium : its religious side, 135 ; shown from 
the oldest marriage ceremony, 136 ; its legal aspect, 138 ; 
marriage cum manu abandoned, 139 ; betrothal, 140 ; 
i'' marriage rites, 142 ; dignified position of Roman matron, 
143 ; the ideal materfamilias, 144 ; change in the character 
of women, 146; its causes, 147; the ladies of Cicero's time, 
150 ; Terentia, 150 ; Pomponia, 152 ; ladies of society and 
culture : Clodia, 155 ; Sempronia, 156 ; divorce, its frequency, 
158 ; a wonderful Roman lady : the Laudatio Turiae, 159 ; 
story of her life and character as recorded by her husband, 
160. 



CONTENTS xi 



CHAPTER VI 

FAOBa 

The Education of the Upper Classes . . 168-203 

An education of character needed, 168 ; Aristotle's idea of 
education, 168 ; little interest taken in education at Rome, 
171 ; biographies silent, 171 ; education of Cato the 
younger, 172 ; of Cicero's son and nephew, 173 ; Varro and 
Cicero on education, 175 ; the old Roman education of the 
body and character, 177 ; causes of its breakdown, 180 ; 
/the new education under Greek influence, 183; schools, 
elementary, 183 ; the ^ntentiae in use in schools, 185 ; 
arithmetic, 186 ; utilitarian character of teaching, 187 ; 
"■ advanced schools, 188 ; teaching too entirely linguistic and 
literary, 189 ; assumption of toga virilis, 191 ; study of 
rhetoric and law, 193 ; oratory the main object, 195 ; 
results of this, 197 ; Cicero's son at the University of 
Athens : his letter to Tiro, 199. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Slave Population .... 204-236 

The demand for labour in second century B.C., 205 ; how it was 
supplied, 206 ; the slave trade, 208 ; kidnapping by pirates, 
etc.,. ^08 ; breeding of slaves, 2T0 ; prices of slaves, 211 ; 
possible number in Cicero's day, 212 ; economic aspect of 
slavery : did it interfere with free labour ? 213 ; no 
apparent rivalry between them, 214 ; either in Rome, 214 ; 
or on the farm, 217 ; the slave-shepherds of South Italy, 
220 ; they exclude free labour, 222 ; legal aspect of slavery : 
absolute power of owner, 223 ; prospect of manumission, 
224 ; political results of slave system, 225 ; of manumission, 
227 ; ethical aspect : destruction of family life, 230 ; no 
moral standard, 232 ; effects of slavery on the slave-owners, 
234. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The House of the Rich Man in Town and Country 237-262 

Out-of-door life at Rome, 237 ; but the Roman house originally 
a home, 238 ; religious character of it, 238 ; the atrium and 
its contents, 240 ; development of atrium : the peristylium, 



Xll 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



242 ; desire for country houses : crowding at Rome, 243 ; 
callers, clients, etc., 245 ; effects of this city life on the 
individual, 246 ; country house of Scipio Africanus, 247 ; 
watering-places in Campania, 248 ; meaning of villa in 
Cicero's time : Hortensius' park, 250 ; Cicero's villas : 
Tusculum, 251 ; Arpinum, 253 ; Formiae, 256 ; Puteoli, 257 ; 
Cumae, 258 ; Pompeii, 258 ; Astura, 259 ; constant change 
of residence, and its effects, 260. 



CHAPTER IX 



The Daily Life of the Well-to-do , 



263-284 



Roman division of the day, 263 ; sundials, 265 ; hours varied 
according to the season, 265 ; early rising of Romans, 266 
want of artificial light, 267 ; Cicero's early hours, 268 
early callers, 269 ; breakfast, followed by business, 270 
morning in the Forum, 271 ; lunch (prandium), 273 ; siesta, 
274 ; the bath, 275 ; dinner : its hour becomes later, 277 
dinner-parties : the triclinium, 279 ; drinking after dinner 
279 ; Cicero's indifference to the table, 282 ; his entertain 
ment of Caesar at Cumae, 283. 



CHAPTER X 



Holidays and Public Amusements 



285-318 



The Italian festa, ancient and modern, 285 ; meaning of the word 
feriae, 287 ; change in its meaning, 288 ; holidays of plebs, 
289 ; festival of Anna Perenna, 289 ; The Saturnalia, 290 ; 
the ludi and their origin, 291 ; ludi Romani and plebeii, 
292 ; other ludi, 293 ; supported by State, 294 ; by private 
individuals, 295 ; admission free, 298 ; Circus maximus and 
chariot-racing, 299 ; gladiators at funeral games, 302 ; 
stage-plays at ludi, 304 ; political feeling expressed at the 
theatre, 306 ; decadence of tragedy in Cicero's time, 308 ; 
the first permanent theatre, 55 a J., 309 ; opening of 
Pompey's theatre, 310 ; Cicero's acciount of it, 311 ; the 
great actors of Cicero's day : Aesopus, 313 ; Roscius, 314 ; 
the farces, 315 ; Publilius Syrus and the mime, 317. 



CONTENTS xiii 



CHAPTER XI 

PAGES 

Rbligion , . . . . . 319-352 

Absence of real religious feeling, 319 ; neglect of worship, 
except in the family, 320 ; foreign cults, e.g. of Isis, 322 ; 
religious attitude of Cicero and other public men : free 
thought, combined with maintenance of the ius divinum, 
323 ; Lucretius condemns all religion as degrading : his 
failure to produce a substitute for it, 326 ; Stoic attitude 
towards religion : Stoicism finds room for the gods of the 
State, 332 ; Varro's treatment of theology on Stoic lines, 
335 ; his monotheistic conception of Jupiter Capitolinus, 
337 ; the Stoic Jupiter a legal rather than a moral deity, 
340 ; Jupiter in the Aeneid, 341 ; superstition of the age, 
343 ; belief in portents, visions, etc. , 344 ; ideas of im- 
mortality, 346 ; sense of sin, or despair of the future, 350. 



Epilogue ...... 353-355 



Index ...*... 357-362 



ILLUSTEATIONS 



P1.0S 

Plan of House of the Silver Wedding at Pompbii . 244 

Map to Illustrate the Position of Cicero's Villas . 252 

Plan of the Villa of Diomedes at Pompeii . .255 

Plan of a Triclinium . . . . .279 

MAP 

Rome in the Last Years of the Republic . At end of Volume 



XV 



::-3 



CHAPTER I 

TOPOGRAPHICAL 

The modern traveller of to-day arriving at Rome by 
rail drives to his hotel through the uninteresting 
streets of a modern town, and thence finds his way 
to the Forum and the Palatine, where his attention 
is speedily absorbed by excavations which he finds 
it difficult to understand. It is as likely as not 
that he may leave Rome without once finding an 
opportunity of surveying the whole site of the 
ancient city, or of asking, and possibly answering 
the question, how it ever came to be where it is. 
While occupied with museums and picture-galleries, 
he may well fail 'Hotam aestimare Romam." ^ 
Assuming that the reader has never been in Rome, 
I wish to transport him thither in imagination, and 
with the h Ip of the map, by an entirely different 
route. But first let him take up the eighth book 
of the Aeneid, and read afresh the oldest and most 
picturesque of all stories of arrival at Rome ; ^ let 

1 Martial iv. 64. 12. 

^Aen. viii. 90 foil. The Capitoline hill, which Virgil means by 
*'arx," is a conspicuous object from the river just below the Aventine, 

E B 



2 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

him dismiss all handbooks from his mind, and con- 
centrate , it on Aeneas and his ships on their way 
from the sea to the site of the Eternal City. 

Virgil showed himself a true artist in bringing 
his hero up the Tiber, which in his day was freely 
used for navigation up to and even above the city. 
He saw that by the river alone he could land him 
exactly where he could be shown by his friendly 
host, almost at a glance, every essential feature of 
the site, every spot most hallowed by antiquity in 
the minds of his readers. Rowing up the river, 
which graciously slackened its swift current, Aeneas 
presently caught sight of the walls and citadel, and 
landed just beyond the point where the Aventine 
hill falls steeply almost to the water's edge. Here 
in historical times was the dockyard of Rome; and 
here, when the poet was a child, Cato had landed 
with the spoils of Cyprus, as the nearest point of 
the river for the conveyance of that ill-gotten gain 
to the treasury under the Capitol.^ Virgil imagines 
the bank clothed with wood, and in the wood — 
where afterwards was the Forum Boarium, a crowded 
haunt — Aeneas finds Evander sacrificing at the Ara 
maxima of Hercules, of all spots the best starting- 
point for a walk through the heart of the ancient city. 

and would have been mucli more conspicuous in tb"^ poet's time. There 
is a view of it from this point in Burn's Borne and the Campagna, p. 184. 
^ Plutarch, Cato minor 39. Cato was expected to land at the com- 
mercial docks helow the Aventine (see below, p. 14), where the senate 
and magistrates were awaiting him, but with his usual rudeness rowed 
past them to the navalia. 



TOPOGRAPHICAL 3 

To the right was the Aventine, rising to about a 
hundred and thirty feet above the river, and this was 
the first of the hills of Rome to be impressed on 
the mind of the stranger, by the tale of Hercules 
and Cacus which Evander tells his guest. In front, 
but close by, was the long western flank of the 
Palatine hill, where, when the tale had been told and 
the rites of Hercules completed, Aeneas was to be 
shown the cave of the Lupercal; and again to the 
left, approaching the river within two hundred yards, 
was the Capitol to be : 

Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit, 
Aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis. 

Below it the hero is shown the shrine of the pro- 
phetic nymph Carmenta, with the Porta Car- 
mentahs leading into the Campus Martins; then 
the hollow destined one day to be the Forum 
Romanum, and beyond it, in the valley of the little 
stream that here found its way down from the plain 
beyond, the grove of the Argiletum. Here, and up 
the slope of the Chvus sacer, with which we shall 
presently make acquaintance, were the lowing herds 
of Evander, who then takes his guest to repose for 
the night in his own dweUing on the Palatine, the 
site of the most ancient Roman settlement.^ 

What Evander showed to his visitor, as we shall 
presently see, comprised the whole site of the heart 

1 Aen. viii. 363. Possibly Virgil meant to put this dwelling on the 
site of the future Eegia, just below the Palatine and between it and 
the Porum. See Servius ad loc. 



4 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

and life of the city as it was to be, all that lay under 
the steep sides of the three almost isolated hills, the 
CapitoHne, Palatine, and Aventine. The poet knew 
that he need not extend their walk to the other so- 
called hills, which come down as spurs from the plain 
of the Campagna, — Quirinal, Esquiline, Caelian. 
Densely populated as those were in his own day, 
they were not essential organs of social and political 
life; the pulse of Rome was to be felt beating most 
strongly in the space between them and the river, 
where too the oldest and most cherished associations 
of the Roman people, mythical and historical, were 
fixed. I propose to take the reader, with a single 
deviation, over the same ground, and to ask him to 
imagine it as it was in the period with which we are 
concerned in this book. But first, in order to take in 
with eye and mind the whole city and its position, 
let us leave Aeneas, and crossing to the right bank 
of the Tiber by the Pons Aemilius,^ let us climb to the 
fort of the Janiculum, an ancient outwork against 
attack from the north, by way of the via Aurelia, 
and here enjoy the view which Martial has made for 
ever famous: 

Hinc septem dominos videre montes 
Et totam licet aestimare Romam, 
Albanos quoque Tusculosque colles 
Et quodcunque iacet sub urbe frigus. 

No one who has ever stood on the Janiculum, and 

1 The modern visitor would cross by the Ponte Rotto, which is in 
the same position as the ancient bridge, just below the Tiber island. 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 5 

looked down on the river and the city, and across the 
Latin plain to the Alban mountain and the long line 
of hills— the last spurs of the Apennines— enclosing 
the plain to the north, can fail to reahse that Rome 
was originally an outpost of the Latins, her kinsmen 
and confederates, against the powerful and uncanny 
Etruscan race who dwelt in the undulating hill coun- 
try to the north. The site was an outpost, because 
the three isolated hills make it a natural point of de- 
fence, and of attack towards the north if attack were 
desirable; no such point of similar vantage is to be 
found lower down the river, and if the city had been 
placed higher up, Latium would have been left open 
to attack,— the three hills would have been left open 
to the enemy to gain a firm footing on Latin soil. 
It was also, as it turned out, an admirable base of 
operations for carrying on war in the long and narrow 
peninsula, so awkward, as Hannibal found to his cost, 
for working out a definite plan of conquest. From 
Rome, astride of the Tiber, armies could operate on 
"interior lines" against any combination — could 
strike north, east, and south at the same moment. 
With Latium faithful behind her she could not be 
taken in the rear; the unconquerable Hannibal did 
indeed approach her once on that side, but fell away 
again like a wave on a rocky shore. From the sea 
no enemy ever attempted to reach her till Genseric 
landed at Ostia in a.d. 455. 

Thus it is not difficult to understand how Rome 
came to be the leading city of Latium; how she 



6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

came to work her conquering way into Etruria to the 
north, the land of a strange people who at one time 
threatened to dominate the whole of Italy; how she 
advanced up the Tiber valley and its affluents into 
the heart of the Apennines, and southward into the 
Oscan country of Samnium and the rich plain of 
Campania. A glance at the map of Italy will show 
us at once how apt is Livy's remark that Rome 
was placed in the centre of the peninsula.^ That 
peninsula looks as if it were cleft in twain by the 
Tiber, or in other words, the Tiber drains the greater 
part of central Italy, and carries the water down a 
well-marked valley to a central point on the western 
coast, with a volume greater than that of any other 
river south of the Po. A city therefore that commands 
the Tiber valley, and especially the lower part of it, is 
in a position of strategic advantage with regard to the 
whole peninsula. Now Rome, as Strabo remarked, 
was the only city actually situated on the bank of the 
river ; and Rome was not only on the river, but from the 
earliest times astride of it. She held the land on both 
banks from her own site to the Tiber mouth at Ostia, 
as we know from the fact that one of her most ancient 
priesthoods ^ had its sacred grove five miles down the 
river on the northern bank. Thus she had easy access 
to the sea by the river or by land, and an open way 
inland up the one great natural entrance from the 
sea into central Italy.^ Her position on the Tiber 

1 Livy V. 54. 2 The Fratres Arvales. 

8 For navigation of the river above Kome see Strabo p. 235. 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 7 

is much like that of Hispalis (Seville) on the Baetis, 
or of Aries on the Rhone, cities opening the way of 
commerce or conquest up the basins of two great rivers. 
In spite of some disadvantages, to be noticed directly, 
there was no such favourable position in Italy for a 
virile people apt to fight and to conquer. Capua, in 
the rich volcanic plain of Campania, had far greater 
advantages in the way of natural wealth; but Capua 
was too far south, in a more enervating chmate, and 
virility was never one of her strong points. Corfinium, 
in the heart of the Apennines, once seemed threatening 
to become a rival, and was for a time the centre of a 
rebellious confederation; but this city was too near 
the east coast — an impossible position for a pioneer 
of Itahan dominion. Italy looks west, not east; 
almost all her natural harbours are on her western 
side; and though that at Ostia, owing to the amount 
of silt carried down by the Tiber, has never been a 
good one, it is the only port which can be said to 
command an entrance into the centre of the peninsula. 
No one, however, would contend that the position 
of Rome is an ideal one. Taken in and by itself, 
without reference to Italy and the Mediterranean, 
that position has little to recommend it. It is too 
far from the sea, nearly twenty miles up the valley 
of a river with an inconveniently rapid current, to be 
a great commercial or industrial centre; and such a 
centre Rome has never really been in the whole course 
of her history. There are no great natural sources of 
wealth in the neighbourhood — no mines like those at 



8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Laurium in Attica, no vast expanse of corn-growing 
country like that of Carthage. The river too was 
Hable to flood, as it still is, and a familiar ode of 
Horace tells us how in the time of Augustus the water 
reached even to the heart of the city.^ Lastly, the 
site has never really been a healthy one, especially 
during the months of July and August,^ which are 
the most deadly throughout the basin of the 
Mediterranean. Pestilences were common at Rome 
in her early history, and have left their mark in the 
calendar of her religious festivals; for example, the 
ApoUine games were instituted during the Hannibalic 
war as the result of a pestilence, and fixed for the 
unhealthy month of July. Foreigners from the north 
of Europe have always been liable to fever at Rome; 
invaders from the north have never been able to 
withstand the climate for long; in the Middle Ages 
one German army after another melted away under 
her walls, and left her mysteriously victorious. 

There are some signs that the Romans themselves 
had occasional misgivings about the excellence of 
their site. There was a tradition, that after the 

1 Horace Od. i. 2. After a bad flood in a.d. 15 proposals were made 
for diverting a part of the water coming down tlie Tiber into the Arnus, 
but this met with fatal opposition from the superstition of the country- 
people (Tacitus, Ann. i. 79). Nissan, Italische Landeskunde, i. p. 324, 
has collected the records of these floods. 

2 See Mssen, i. p. 407. But it seems likely that the Tiber valley was 
less malarious then than now (see Nissen's chapter on malaria in Italy, 
p. 410 foil.). In an interesting paper on Malaria and History, by Mr. 
W. H. S. Jones (Liverpool University Press), which reached me after 
this chapter was written, the author is inclined to attribute the ethical 
and physical degeneracy of the Komans of the Empire partly to this cause. 



1 TOPOGRAPHICAL 9 

burning of the city by the Gauls, it was proposed 
that the people should desert the site and migrate 
to Veil, the conquered Etruscan city to the north, 
and that it needed all the eloquence of Camillus to 
dissuade them. It has given Livy ^ the opportunity 
of putting into the orator's mouth a splendid 
encomium on the city and its site ; but no such 
story could well have found a place in Eoman 
annals if the Capitol had been as deeply set in the 
hearts of the people as was the Acropolis in the 
hearts of the Athenians. At a later time of deep 
depression Horace^ could fancifully suggest that the 
Komans should leave their ancient home like the 
Phocaeans of old, and seek a new one in the islands 
of the blest. Some idea was abroad that Caesar had 
meant to transfer the seat of government to Ilium, 
and after Actium the same intention was ascribed to 
Augustus, probably without reason ; but the third 
ode of Horace's third book seems to express the 
popular rumour, and in an interesting paper 
Mommsen^ has stated his opinion that the new master 
of the Eoman world may really have thought of 
changing the seat of government to Byzantium, the 
supreme convenience and beauty of which were 
already beginning to be appreciated.^ 

Virgil, on the other hand, though he came from 
the foot of the Alps and did not love Eome as a place 
to dwell in, is absolutely true to the great traditions 

* Livy V, 54. "^ Horace, Epode 16. 

3 Reden und Aufsatze, p. 173 foil. * lb. p. 175. 



lo SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

of the site. For him " rerum facta est pulcherrima 
Eoma" [Georg. ii. 534); and in the Aeneid the 
destiny of Rome is so foretold and expressed as to 
make it impossible for a Roman reader to think of it 
except in connexion with the city. He who needs to 
be convinced of this has but to turn once more to 
the eighth Aeneid, and to add to the charming story 
of Aeneas' first visit to the seven hills, the splendid 
picture of the origin and growth of Roman dominion 
engraved on the shield which Venus gives her son. 
Cicero again, though he was no Roman by birth, was 
passionately fond of Rome, and in his treatise de 
Repuhlica praised with genuine affection her " nativa 
praesidia." ^ He says of Romulus, *' that he chose 
a spot abounding in springs, healthy though in a 
pestilent region ; for her hills are open to the breezes, 
yet give shade to the hollows below them." And 
Livy, in the passage already quoted, in language 
even more perfect than Cicero's, wrote of all the 
advantages of the site, ending by describing it as 
" regionum Italiae medium, ad incrementum urbis 
natum unice locum." It is curious that all these 
panegyrics were written by men who were not 
natives of Rome ; Virgil came from Mantua, Livy 
from Padua, Cicero from Arpinum. They are doubt- 
less genuine, though in some degree rhetorical ; those 
of Cicero and Livy can hardly be called strictly 
accurate. But taken together they may help 
us to understand that fascination of the site of 

^ De Rep. ii. 5 and 6. 



1 TOPOGRAPHICAL ii 

Kome, to which Virgil gave such inimitable ex- 
pression. 

On this site, which once had been crowded only 
when the Eoman farmers had taken refuge within the 
walls with their families, flocks, and herds on the 
threatening appearance of an enemy, by the time of 
Cicero an enormous population had gathered. Many 
causes had combined to bring this population 
together, which can be only glanced at here. As in 
Europe and America at the present day, so in all 
the Mediterranean lands since the age of Alexander, 
there had been a constantly increasing tendency to 
flock into the towns ; and the rise of huge cities, 
such as Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, Corinth, or 
Ehodes, with all the inevitably ensuing social 
problems and complications, is one of the most 
marked characteristics of the last three centuries B.C. 
In Italy in particular, apart from the love of a 
pleasant social life free from manual toil, with 
various convenient resorts and amusements, the long 
series of wars had served to increase the population, 
in spite of the constant loss by the sword or pesti- 
lence ; for the veteran soldier who had been serving, 
perhaps for years, beyond sea, found it hard to return 
to the monotonous life of agriculture, or perhaps 
found his holding appropriated by some powerful 
landholder with whom it would be hopeless to contest 
possession. The wars too brought a steadily increas- 
ing population of slaves to the city, many of whom 
in course of time would be manumitted, would marry, 



12 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

and so increase the free population. These are only 
a few of the many causes at work after the Punic wars 
which crammed together in the site of Rome a popu- 
lation which, in the latter part of the last century 
B.C., probably reached half a million or even more.^ 

Let us now descend from the Janiculum, and try 
to imagine ourselves in the Rome of Cicero's time, 
say in the last year of the Republic, 50 B.C., as we 
walk through the busy haunts of this crowded 
population. We will not delay on the right bank 
of the Tiber, which had probably long been the home 
of tradesmen in their gilds,^ and where farther down 
the rich were buying land for gardens ^ and suburban 
villas ; but cross by the Pons Aemilius, with the 
Tiber island on our left, and the opening of the 
Cloaca maxima, which drained the water from the 
Forum, facing us, as it still does, a little to our right. 
We find ourselves close to the Forum Boarium, an 
open cattle-market, with shops (tabernae) all around 
it, as we know from Livy's record of a fire here, 
which burnt many of these shops and much valuable 
merchandise.^ Here by the river was in fact the 

^ Beloch, Die Bewolkerung der griechiseh-romischen Welt, cap. 9, approach- 
ing the problem by three several methods, puts it in the first century a.d. 
at 800, 000, including slaves. In Cicero's time it was, no doubt, considerably 
less ; but we know that in his last years 320,000 free persons were receiving 
doles of com, apart from slaves and the well-to-do. 

^ Hiilsen-Jordan, Bom. Topographie, vol. i. part iii. pp. 627, 638. 

^ Ih. 643 ; Cic. ad Att. xv. 15. Here, after the death of his daughter 
TuUia, Cicero wished to buy land on which to erect a fanum to her (Cic. 
ad Att. xii. 19). Here also were the horti Caesaris. 

* Livy XXXV. 40. 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 13 

market in the modern sense of the word ; the Forum 
Eomanum, which we are making for, was now the 
centre of political and judicial business, and of 
social life. 

We might go direct to the great Forum, up the 
Velabrum, or valley (once a marsh), right in front of 
us between the Capitol on the left and the Palatine 
on the right. But as we look in the latter direction, 
we are attracted by a long low erection almost fill- 
ing the space between the Palatine and the Aventine, 
and turning in that direction we find ourselves at the 
lower end of the Circus Maximus, which as yet is the 
chief place of amusement of the Roman people. Two 
famous shrines, one at each end of it, remind us that 
we are on historic ground. At the end where we 
stand, and where are the carceres, the starting-point 
for the competing chariots, was the Ara maxima of 
Hercules, which prompted Evander to tell the tale of 
Cacus to his guest ; at the other end was the subter- 
ranean altar of Consus the harvest-god, with which 
was connected another tale, that of the rape of the 
Sabines. All the associations of this quarter point to 
the agricultural character of the early Romans ; both 
cattle and harvesting have their appropriate myth. 
But nothing is visible here now, except the pretty 
little round temple of a later date, which is believed 
to have been that of Portunus, the god of the landing- 
place from the river. ^ 

The Circus, some six hundred yards long, at the 

^ Hiilsen-Jordan, op. cit. p. 143 note. 



14 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

time of Cicero was still mainly a wooden erection in 
the form of a long parallelogram, with shops or booths 
sheltering under its sides ; we shall visit it again when 
dealing with the public entertainments.^ Above it on 
the right is the Aventine hill, a densely populated 
quarter of the lower classes, crowned with the famous 
temple of Diana, a deity specially connected with the 
plebs.^ The Clivus Patricius led up to this temple ; 
down this slope, on the last day of his life, Gains 
Gracchus had hurried, to cross the river and meet 
his murderers in the grove of Furrina, of which the 
site has lately been discovered. If we were to 
ascend it we should see, on the river-bank below and 
beyond it, the warehouses and granaries for storing 
the corn for the city's food-supply, which Gracchus 
had been the first to extend and organise. 

But to ascend the Aventine would take us out 
of our course. Pushing on to the farther end of the 
Circus, where the chariots turned at the metae, we 
may pause a moment, for in front of us is a gate in 
the city wall, the Porta Capena, by which most 
travellers from the south, using the via Appia or the 
via Latina, would enter the city.^ Outside the wall 
there was then a small temple of Mars, from which 

^ See below, p. 302. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (iii. 68) gives an 
elaborate account of it in the time of Augustus, when it had been altered 
and ornamented. — Hiilsen- Jordan, p. 120 foil. 

^ Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 199 ; Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, Real- 
Encyklopddie, s.v. Diana. 

^ The two roads converged just before arriving at the city. The reader 
may be reminded that it was by the via Appia that St. Paul entered Rome 
(Acts xxviii.). Another useful passage for this gate is Juvenal iii. 10 foil. 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 15 

the procession of the Equites started each year on the 
Ides of Quinctilis (July) on its way to the Capitol, 
by the same route that we are about to take. We 
shall also be following the steps of Cicero on the happy 
day, September 4, 57 B.C., when he returned from 
exile. " On my arrival at the Porta Capena," he writes 
to Atticus, "the steps of the temples were already 
crowded from top to bottom by the populace ; they 
showed their congratulations by the loudest applause, 
and similar crowds and applause followed me right 
up to the Capitol, and in the Forum and on the 
Capitol _ itself there was again a wonderful throng " 
{ad Att. iv. 1). 

We are now, as the map will show, at the south- 
eastern angle of the Palatine, of which, in fact, we are 
making the circuit ; ^ and here we turn sharp to the 
left, by what is now the via di San Gregorio, along a 
narrow valley or dip between the Palatine and Caelian 
hills — the latter the first we have met of the " hills " 
which are not isolated, but spurs of the plain of the 
Campagna. The Caelian need not detain us ; it was 
thickly populated towards the end of the Republican 
period, but was not a very fashionable quarter, nor 
one of the chief haunts of social life. It held many 
of those large lodging-houses (insulae) of which we 
shall hear more in the next chapter; one of these 
stood so high that it interfered with the view of the 
augur taking the auspices on the Capitol, and was 

^ It might be useful here to follow the course of the pomerium, which 
also went round the Palatine, as described in Tacitus, Annals xii. 24. 



i6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

ordered to be pulled down.^ Going straight on we 
reach the north-eastern angle of the Palatine, where 
now stands the arch of Constantine, with the Colosseum 
beyond it, and turning once more to the left, we begin 
to ascend a gentle slope which will take us to a ridge 
between the Palatine and the Esquiline ^ — another of 
the spurs of the plain beyond — known by the name 
of the Velia. And now we are approaching the real 
heart of the city. 

At this point starts the Sacra via,^ so called 
because it is the way to the most sacred spots of the 
ancient Roman city, — the temples of Vesta and the 
Penates, and the Regia, once the dwelling of the 
Rex, now of the Pontifex Maximus ; and it will lead 
us, in a walk of about eight hundred yards, through 
the Forum to the Capitol. It varied in breadth, and 
took by no means a straight course, and later on was 
crowded, cramped, and deflected by numerous temples 
and other buildings ; but as yet, so far as we can guess, 
it was fairly free and open. We follow it and ascend 
the slope till we come to a point known as the summa 
sacra via, just where the arch of Titus now stands, 
and where then was the temple of Jupiter Stator, 
and where also a shrine of the public Penates and 
another of the Lares (of which no trace is now left) 
warn us that we are close on the penetralia of the 
Roman State. Here a way to the left leads up to the 

^ Oic. de Officiis iii. 16. 66, and the story there related. 
^ Strictly speaking, the Oppius Mons, or southern part of the Esquiline. 
^ See Lanciani's admirable chapter, " A Walk through the Sacra Via," in 
his Euins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, p. 190 foil. 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 17 

Palatine, the residence then of many of the leading 
men of Rome, Cicero being one of them. 

But our attention is not long arrested by these 
objects ; it is soon riveted on the Forum below and 
in front of us, to which the Sacred Way leads by a 
downward slope, the CUvus sacer. At the north- 
western end it is closed in by the Capitoline hill, 
with its double summit, the arx to the right, and 
the great temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva facing 
south-east towards the Aventine. It is of this view 
that Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote 
of the happy lot of the countryman who 

nee ferrea iura 
insanumque forum aut populi tabularia vidit.^ 

For the Forum is crowded with bustling human 
figures, intent on the business of politics, or of the 
law-courts (ferrea iura), or of money-making, and just 
beyond it, immediately under the Capitol, are the 
record-offices (tabularia) of the Roman Empire. The 
whole Sacra via from this point is crowded; here 
Horace a generation later was to meet his immortal 
"bore," from whom he only escaped when the 
" ferrea iura " laid a strong hand on that terrible 
companion. Down below, at the entrance to the 
Forum by the arch of Fabius (fornix Fabiana), the 
jostling was great. "If I am knocked about in 
the crowd at the arch," says Cicero, to illustrate 
a point in a speech of this time, " I do not accuse 

^ Georg. ii. 502. Virgil, for all his admiration of Rome, did not love its 
crowds. 

C 



i8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

some one at the top of the via Sacra, but the man 
who jostles me." -^ 

The Forum — for from this point we can take it 
all in, geologically and historically — lies in a deep 
hollow, to the original level of which excavation has 
now at last reached. This hollow was formed by a 
stream which came down between the Esquiline and 
the Quirinal beyond it, and made its exit towards 
the river on the other side by way of the Yelabrum. 
As the city extended itself, amalgamating with 
another community on the Quirinal, this hollow 
became a common meeting-place and market, and the 
stream was in due time drained by that Cloaca which 
we saw debouching into the Tiber near the bridge we 
crossed. The upper course of this stream, between 
Esquiline and Quirinal, is a densely populated quarter 
known as the Argiletum, and higher up as the 
Subura,^ where artisans and shops abounded. The 
lower part of its course, where it has become an 
invisible drain, is also a crowded street, the vicus 
Tuscus, leading to the Velabrum, and so to our 
starting-point at the Forum Boarium. 

Let us now descend the Clivus sacer, crossing to 
the right-hand side of the slope, which the via Sacra 
now follows, and reach the Forum by the fornix 
Fabiana. Close by to our left is the round temple of 
Vesta, where the sacred fire of the State is kept ever 

^ Cic. ;pro Plancio, ch. 7. Cp, Horace, Sat. i. 9 ; Lucilius, Frag. 9 (ed. 
Baehrens), which last will be quoted in another context. 

^ On the vexed question of the position of the Subura and its history 
see Wissowa, OesamTmlte Ahhandlungen, p. 230 foil. 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 19 

burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here 
too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also 
that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose 
potestas they were ; these three buildings, then 
insignificant to look at, constituted the religious 
focus of the oldest Rome.-^ A little farther again to 
the left is the temple of Castor and the spring of 
Juturna, lately excavated, where the Twins watered 
their steeds after the battle of the lake Regillus. In 
front of us we can see over the heads of the crowd 
the Rostra at the farther end of the Forum, where an 
orator is perhaps addressing a crowd [contio) on some 
political question of the moment, and giving some 
occupation to the idlers- in the throng; and to the 
right of the Rostra is the Comitium or assembling- 
place of the people, with the Curia, the ancient 
meeting-hall of the senate. In Cicero's day the mere 
shopman had been got rid of from the Forum, and 
his place is taken by the banker and money-lender, 
who do their business in tabernae stretching in rows 
along both sides of the open space. Much public 
business, judicial and other, is done in the Basilicae, — 
roofed halls with colonnades, of which there are 
already five, and a new one is arising on the south 
side, of which the ground-plan, as it was extended 
soon afterwards by Julius Caesar, is now completely 
laid bare. But it is becoming evident that the 
business of the Empire cannot be much longer crowded 
into this narrow space of the Forum, which is only 

\ ^ For excavations here see Lanciani, op. cit. p. 221 foil. 



20 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

about two hundred yards long by seventy ; and the 
next two generations will see new Fora laid out, 
larger and more commodious, by Julius and Augustus, 
in the direction of the Quirinal. 

Now making our way towards the Capitol, we pass 
the famous temple or rather gate of the double- 
headed Janus, standing at the entrance to the Forum 
from the Argiletum and the Porta Esquilina ; then 
the Comitium and Curia (which last was burnt by 
the mob in 52 B.C., at the funeral of Clodius), 
and reach the foot of the Clivus Capitolinus, just 
where was (and is) the ancient underground prison, 
called Tulhanum, from the old word for a spring 
[tuUus], the scene of the deaths of Jugurtha and 
many noble captives, and of the Catilinarian con- 
spirators on December 5, 63. Here the via Sacra 
turns, in front of the temple of Concordia, to ascend 
the Capitol. Behind this temple, extending farther 
under the slope, is the Tabularium, already mentioned, 
which is still much as it was then ; and below us 
to the south is the temple of Saturnus, the treasury 
(aerarium) of the Eoman people. Thus at this end of 
the Forum, under the Capitol, are the whole set of 
public offices, facing the ancient religious buildings 
around the Vesta temple at the other end. 

The way now turns again to the right, and reaches 
the depression between the two summits of the 
Capitoline hill. Leaving the arx on the left, we 
reach by a long flight of steps the greatest of al] 
Roman temples, placed on a long platform with solid 



I TOPOGRAPHICAL 21 

substructures of Etruscan workmansliip, part of 
which is still to be seen in the garden of the German 
Embassy. The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 
with his companions Juno and Minerva, was in a 
very special sense the religious centre of the State 
and its dominion. Whatever view he might take of 
the gods and their cults, every Roman instinctively 
believed that this great Jupiter, above all other 
deities, watched over the welfare of Rome, and 
when a generation later Virgil placed the destiny of 
Rome's mythical hero in the hands of Jupiter, every 
Roman recognised in this his own inherited con- 
viction. Here, on the first day of their office, the 
higher magistrates offered sacrifice in fulfilment of the 
vows of their predecessors, and renewed the same 
vows themselves. The consul about to leave the city 
for a foreign war made it his last duty to sacrifice 
here, and on his return he deposited here his booty. 
Here came the triumphal procession along the Sacred 
"Way, the conquering general attired and painted like 
the statue of the god within the temple ; and upon 
the knees of the statue he placed his wreath of laurel, 
rendering up to the deity what he had himself 
deigned to bestow. Here too, from a pedestal on the 
platform, a statue of Jupiter looked straight over 
the Forum,^ the Curia, and the Comitium ; and Cicero 
could declare from the Rostra, and know that in so 
declaring he was touching the hearts of his hearers, 
that on that same day on which it had first been 

^ Cic. Cat. iii, 9. 21 foil. 



22 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

so placed, the macliinations of Catiline and his 
conspirators had been detected.^ " lUe, ille lupiter 
restitit ; ille Capitolium, ille haec templa, ille cunctam 
urbem, ille vos omnes salvos esse voluit." 

The temple had been destroyed by fire in the time 
of Sulla, and its restoration was not as yet finally 
completed at the time of our imaginary walk.^ It 
faced towards the river and the Aventine, i.e. south- 
east, according to the rules of augural lore, like all 
Eoman public buildings of the Eepublican period. 
From the platform on which it stands we look down 
on the Forum Boarium, from which we started, 
connected with the Forum by the Velabrum and the 
vicus Tuscus ; and more to the right below us is the 
Campus Martins, with access to the city by that 
Porta Carmentalis which Evander showed to Aeneas. 
This spacious exercise-ground of Roman armies is 
already beginning to be built upon ; in fact the 
Circus Flaminius has been there for more than a 
century and a half, and now the new theatre of 
Pompeius, the first stone theatre in Rome, rises 
beyond it towards the Vatican hill. But there is 
ample space left ; for it is nearly a mile from the 
Capitol to that curve of the Tiber above which the 
Church of St. Peter now stands; and on this large 
expanse, at the present day, the greater part of a 
population of nearly half a million is housed. 

^ Formerly we may assume that it faced south or south-east, like the 
temple. 

^ It was completed by Caesar in 46 B.O. 



1 TOPOGRAPHICAL 23 

I do not propose to take tlie reader farther. 
We have been through the heart of the city, as it 
was at the close of the EepubHcan period, and 
from the platform of the great temple we can see 
all else that we need to keep in mind in these 
chapters. 



CHAPTEE II 

THE LOWER POPULATION (PLEBS URBANA) 

The walk we liave been taking has led us only 
through the heart of the city, in which were the 
public buildings, temples, basilicas, porticos, etc., 
of which we hear so much in Latin literature. It 
was on the hills which are spurs of the plain beyond, 
and which look down over the Forum and the Campus 
Martins, the Caelian, Esquiline, and Quirinal, with 
the hollows lying between them, and also on the 
Aventine by the river, that the mass of the population 
lived. The most ancient fortification of completed 
Kome, the so-called Servian wall- and agger, enclosed 
a singularly large space, larger, we are told, than 
the walls of any old city in Italy ; ^ it is likely 
that a good part of this space was long unoccupied 
by houses, and served to shelter the cattle of the 
farmers living outside, when an enemy was threaten- 
ing attack. But in Cicero's time, as to-day, all this 
space was covered with dwellings ; and as the centre 
of the city came to be occupied with public buildings, 
erected on sites often bought from private owners, the 

^ Beloch, Bewolkerung, p. 382. 

24 



CHAP. 11 THE LOWER POPULATION 25 

houses were gradually pushed out along the roads 
beyond the walls. Exactly the same process has 
been going on for centuries in the University city of 
Oxford, where the erection of colleges gradually 
absorbed the best sites within the old walls, so that 
many of the dwelling-houses are now quite two miles 
from the centre of the city. The fact is attested for 
Eome by the famous municipal law of Julius Caesar, 
which directs that for a mile outside the gates every 
resident is to look after the repair of the road in front 
of his own house. -"^ 

As a general rule, the heights in Eome were 
occupied by the better class of residents, and the 
hollows by the lower stratum of population. This 
was not indeed entirely so, for poor people no doubt 
lived on the Aventine, the Caelian, and parts of the 
Esquiline. But the Palatine was certainly an aristo- 
cratic quarter ; the Carinae, the height looking down 
on the hollow where the Colosseum now stands, had 
many good houses, e.g. those of Pompeius and of 
Quintus Cicero, and we know of one man of great 
wealth, Atticus, who lived on the Quirinal.^ It was 
in the narrow hollows leading down from these 
heights to the Forum, such as the Subura between 
Esquiline and Quirinal, and the Argiletum farther 
down near the Forum, that we meet in literature 
with what we may call the working classes ; the 

^ C.I.L. i. 206, and Dessau, Inscr. Lot. Selectae, ii. 1. p. 493. 
^ Cic. ad Q. Fratr. iii, 1, 14 ; Suet, de Orammaticis, 15 ; Corn. Nepos, 
Atticus, 13. 



26 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Argiletum, for example, was famous both for" its 
booksellers and its shoemakers/ and the Subura is the 
typical street of tradesmen. And no doubt the big 
lodsinsr-houses in which the lower classes dwelt were 
to be found in all parts of Eome, except the strictly 
aristocratic districts like the Palatine. 

The whole free population may roughly be divided 
into three classes, of which the first two, constituting 
together the social aristocracy, were a mere handful 
in number compared with the third. At the 
top of the social order was the governing class, or 
ordo senatorius : then came the ordo equester, com- 
prising all the men of business, bankers, money- 
lenders, and merchants {negotiatores) or contractors 
for the raising of taxes and many other purposes 
(puhlicani). Of these two upper classes and their 
social life we shall see something in later chapters ; 
at present vv^e are concerned with the "masses," at 
least 320,000 in number,^ and the social problems 
which their existence presented, or ought to have 
presented, to an intelligent Eoman statesman of 
Cicero's time. 

Unfortunately, just as we know but little of the 
populous districts of Rome, so too we know little of 
its industrial population. The upper classes, includ- 
ing all writers of memoirs and history, were not 
interested in them. There was no philanthropist, no 

^ Hiilsen-Jordan, Eiim. Topographic, vol. i. part iii. p. 323. 
2 This is the number receiving corn gratis when Julius Caesar reformed 
the corn-distribution. — Suetonius, lul. 41. 



11 THE LOWER POPULATION 27 

devoted inquirer like Mr. Charles Booth, to investi- 
gate their condition or try to ameliorate it. The 
statesman, if he troubled himself about them at all, 
looked on them as a dangerous element of society, 
only to be considered as human beings at election 
time ; at all other times merely as animals that had 
to be fed, in order to keep them from becoming an 
active peril. The philosopher, even the Stoic, whose 
creed was by far the most ennobling in that age, 
seems to have left the dregs of the people quite out 
of account; though his philosophy nominally took 
the whole of mankind into its cognisance, it believed 
the masses to be degraded and vicious, and made no 
effort to redeem them.^ The Stoic might profess the 
teriderest feeling towards all mankind, as Cicero did, 
when moved by some recent reading of Stoic 
doctrine ; he might say that " men were born for the 
sake of men, that each should help the other," or 
that " Nature has inclined us to love men, for this 
is the foundation of all law";^ but when in actual 
social or political contact with the same masses 
Cicero could only speak of them with contempt or 
disgust. It is a melancholy and significant fact that 
what little we do know from literature about this 
class is derived from the part they occasionally 
played in riots and revolutionary disorders. It is 
fortunately quite impossible that the historian of the 

^ See Zeller, Stoics, etc., Eng. trans, p. 255 foil. 

2 Cic. de Legibus, i, 15. 43. It was not as yet possible to be "poor, 
yet making many rich " ; to have nothing and yet to possess all things. 



28 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

future should take account of the life of the educated 
and wealthy only ; but in the history of the past, 
and especially of the last three centuries B.C., we have 
to contend with this dijfficulty, and can only now and 
then find side-lights thrown upon the great mass 
of mankind. The crime, the crowding, the occasional 
suffering from starvation and pestilence, in the un- 
fashionable quarters of such a city as Eome, these 
things are hidden from us, and rarely even suggested 
by the histories we commonly read. 

The three questions to which I wish to make 
some answer in this chapter are : (1) how was this 
population housed ? (2) how was it supplied with 
food and clothing ? and (3) how was it employed ? 

1. It was of course impossible in a city like Rome 
that each man, married or unmarried, should have 
his own house; this is not so even in the great 
majority of modern industrial towns, though we in 
England are accustomed to see our comparatively 
well-to-do artisans dwelling in cottages spreading 
out into the country. At Rome only the wealthy 
families lived in separate houses {domus), about 
which we shall have something to say in another 
chapter. The mass of the population lived, or rather 
ate and slept (for southern climates favour an out- 
of-door life), in huge lodging-houses called islands 
{insulae), because they were detached from other 
buildings, and had streets on all sides of them, as 
islands have water. ^ These insulae were often three 

^ See the definition of insula in Festus, p. Ill, and for insula generally 



11 THE LOWER POPULATION 29 

or four stories Hgh;^ the ground -floor was often 
occupied by shops, kept perhaps by some of 
the lodgers, and the upper floors by single rooms, 
with small windows looking out on the street or 
into an interior court. The common name for 
such a room was coenaculum, or dining-room, a 
word which seems to be taken over from the 
coenaculum of private houses, i.e. an eating -room 
on the first floor, where there was one. Once 
indeed we hear of an aedicula in an insula, 
which was perhaps the equivalent of a modern 
" flat " ; it was inhabited by a young bachelor 
of good birth, M. Caelius Eufus, the friend of 
Cicero, and in this case the insula was probably 
one of a superior kind.^ The common lodging- 
house must have been simply a rabbit-warren, 
the crowded inhabitants using their rooms only 
for eating and sleeping, while for the most part 
they prowled about, either idling or getting such 
employment as they could, legitimate or other- 
wise. 

In such a life there could of course have been no 
idea of home, or of that simple and sacred family life 
which had once been the ethical basis of Eoman 

Middleton's article " Domus " in the Diet, of Antiquities, ed. 2. De March! 
{La Heligione nella vita domestica, i. p. 80) compares the big lodging-houses 
of the poor at Naples. 

^ Cicero {Leg. Agr. ii. 35. 96) describes Rome as being (in comparison with 
Capua) "in montibus positam et convallibus, coenaculis (i.e. upper rooms) 
sublatam atque suspensam, non optimis viis," etc. Vitruv. ii. 17 is the 
locus classicus. 

Cic. pro Caelio 17. 



30 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

society/ When we read Cicero's thrilliiig language 
about the loss of his own house, after his return from 
exile, and then turn to think of the homeless crowds 
in the rabbit-warrens of Eome, we can begin to feel 
the contrast between the wealth and poverty of that 
day. " What is more strictly protected," he says, 
" by all religious feeling, than the house of each 
individual citizen ? Here is his altar, his hearth, 
here are his Di Penates : here he keeps all the objects 
of his worship and performs all his religious rites : 
his house is a refuge so solemnly protected, that no 
one can be torn from it by force." " The warm- 
hearted Cicero is here, as so often, dreaming dreams : 
the " each individual citizen " of whom he speaks is 
the citizen of his own acquaintance, not the vast 
majority, with whom his mind does not trouble itself. 
These insulae were usually built or owned by men 
of capital, and were often called by the names of 
their owners. Cicero, in one of his letters,^ incident- 
^ ally mentions that he had money thus invested ; and 
. we are disposed to wonder whether his insulae were 
kept in good repair, for in another letter he happens 
to tell his man of business that shops (tabernae) 
belonging to him were tumbling down and unoccu- 
pied. It is more than likely that many of the 

^ In C.I.L. vi. 65-67 we find a Bona Dea erected " in tutelam insulae," i.e. 
a common cult for all the lodgers. De Marchi I.e. compares the common 
shrine of the Neapolitan lodging-house. Tutela is mentioned as a protecting 
deity both of insulae and domus by St. Jerome, Com. in Isaiam, 672. 

2 Cic. de Domo 109. 

^ Cic. ad Att. xv. 17 ; cp. xiv. 9. 



II THE LOWER POPULATION 31 

insulae were badly built by speculators, and liable to 
collapse. The following passage from Plutarch's Life 
of Crassus suggests this, though, if Plutarch is right, 
Crassus did not build himself, but let or sold his sites 
and builders to others : " Observing (in Sulla's time) 
the accidents that were familiar at Kome, conflagra- 
tions and tumbling down of houses owing to their 
weight and crowded state, he bought slaves who were 
architects and builders. Having collected these to 
the number of more than five hundred, it was his 
practice to buy up houses on fire, and houses next to 
those on fire : for the owners, frightened and anxious, 
would sell them cheap. And thus the greater part 
of Eome fell into the hands of Crassus : but though 
he had so many artisans, he built no house except 
his own, for he used to say that those who were fond 
of building ruined themselves without the help of an 
enemy." ^ The fall of houses, and their destruction 
in the frequent fires, became familiar features of life 
at Eome about this time, and are alluded to by 
Catullus in his twenty-third poem, and later on by 
Strabo in his description of Rome (p. 235). It must 
indeed have often happened that whole families were 
utterly homeless ; ^ and in those days there were no 
insurance offices, no benefit societies, no philanthropic 
institutions to rescue the sufi'ering from undeserved 
misery. As we shall see later on, they were con- 

^ Plut. Crassus 2 : perhaps from Fenestella. 

2 "Dormientem in taberna," Asconius, ed. Clark, p. 37. Cp. Tacitus, 
Sist, i. 86, for persons sleeping in tabernae. 



32 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

stantly in debt, and in the hands of the money- 
lender ; and against his extortions their judicial 
remedies were most precarious. But all this is 
hidden from our eyes : only now and again we can 
hear a faint echo of their inarticulate cry for help. 

2. The needs of these poorer classes in respect of 
food and drink were very small ; it was only the 
vast number of them that made the supply difficult. 
The Italians, like the Greeks,^ were then as now 
almost entirely vegetarians ; cattle and sheep were 

. used for the production of cheese, leather, and wool, 
or for sacrifices to the gods ; the only animal 

. commonly eaten, until luxury came in with increasing 
wealth, was the pig, and grain and vegetables were 
the staple food of the poor man, both in town and 
country. Among the lesser poems ascribed to Virgil 
there is one, the Moretum, which gives a charming 
picture of the food-supply of the small cultivator in 
the country. He rises very early, gropes his way to 
the hearth, and stirs the embers into flame : then 
takes from his meal-bin a supply of grain for three 
days and proceeds to grind it in a hand-mill, knead 
it with water, shape it into round cakes divided into 
four parts like a " hot-cross bun," and, with the help 
of his one female slave, to bake these in the embers. 
He has no sides of smoked bacon, says the poet, 
hanging from his roof, but only a cheese, so to add 
to his meal he goes into his garden and gathers 
thence a number of various herbs and vegetables, 

^ Tucker, Life in Ancient Athens, p. 10. 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 3^ 

which he then makes into the hotch-potch, or pot-au- 
feu, which gives the name to the poem. This bit of 
delicate genre-painting, which is as good in its way 
as anything in Crabbe's homely poems, has indeed 
nothing to tell us of life in an insula at Rome ; but 
it may serve to show what was the ordinary food of 
the Italian of that day.^ The absence of the sides of 
bacon (" durati sale terga suis," line 57) is interesting. 
No doubt the Roman took meat when he could get 
it ; but to have to subsist on it, even for a short time, 
was painful to him, and more than once Caesar 
remarks on the endurance of his soldiers in submit- 
ting to eat meat when corn was not to be had.^ 

The corn which was at this time the staple food of 
the Romans of the city was wheat, and wheat of a 
good kind ; in primitive times it had been an inferior 
species called yar, which survived in Cicero's day only 
in the form of cakes offered to the gods in religious 
ceremonies. The wheat was not brought from Italy 
or even from Latium ; what each Italian community 
then grew was not more than supplied its own 
inhabitants,^ and the same was the case with the 
country villas of the rich, and the huge sheep-farms 
worked by slaves. By far the greater part of Italy 
is mountainous, and not well suited to the production 

^ The Moretum may be a translation from a Greek poet, perhaps Par- 
thenius, but it is certainly as well adapted to the experience of Italians. 

2 e.g. Caesar, Bell. Civ. iii. 47. Cp. Tacitus, Ann. xiv, 24. 

' On this point see Salvioli, Le Capitalisme dans le monde antique, ch. vi. 
This is a book with many shortcomings, but written by an Italian who knows 
his own country. 

D 



34 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

of corn on a large scale ; and for long past other 
causes had combined to limit what production there 
was. Transport too, whether by road or river, was 
full of difficulty, while on the other hand a glance at 
the map will show that the voyage for corn-ships 
between Eome and Sicily, Sardinia, or the province of 
Africa (the former dominion of Carthage), was both 
short and easy — far shorter and easier than the voyage 
from Cisalpine Gaul or even from Apulia, where the 
peninsula was richest in good corn-land. So we are 
not surprised to find that, according to tradition, which 
is fully borne out by more certain evidence,^ corn had 
been brought to Eome from Sicily as early as 492 B.C. 
to relieve a famine, or that since Sicily, Sardinia, and 
Africa had become Eoman provinces, their vast pro- 
ductive capacity was utilised to feed the great city. 

Nor indeed need we be surprised to find that the 
State has taken over the task of feeding the Eoman 
population, and of feeding it cheaply, if only we are 
accustomed to think, not merely to read, about life in 
the city at this period. Nothing is more difficult for 
the ordinary reader of ancient history than to realise 
the difficulty of feeding large masses of human beings, 
whether crowded in towns or soldiers in the field. Our 
means of transport are now so easily and rapidly set in 
action and maintained, that it would need a war with 
some great sea -power to convince us that London 
or Glasgow might, under certain untoward circum- 
stances, be starved ; and as our attention has never 

^ See the author's Roman Festivals, p. 76 (Cerealia). 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 35 

been drawn to the details of food-supply, we do not 
readily see why there should have been any such 
difficulty at Kome as to call for the intervention of 
the State. Perhaps the best way to reahse the problem 
is to reflect that every adult inhabitant needed about 
four and a half pecks of corn per month, or some three 
pounds a day ; so that if the population of Rome be 
taken at half a million in Cicero's time, a million and 
a half pounds would be demanded as the daily con- 
sumption of the people/ I have already said that 
in the last three centuries B.C. there was a universal 
tendency to leave the country for the towns ; and we 
now know that many other cities besides Rome not 
only felt the same difficulty, but actually used the , 
same remedy — State importation of cheap corn.^ 
Even comparatively small cities like Dyrrhachium and 
ApoUonia in Epirus, as Caesar tells us while narrat- 
ing his own difficulty in feeding his army there, used 
for the most part imported corn.^ And we must 
remember that while some of the greatest cities on 
the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria and Antioch, 
were within easy reach of vast corn-fields, this was 
not the case with Rome. Either she must organise 
her corn -supply on a secure basis, or get rid of her 
swarms of poor inhabitants ; the latter alternative 
might have been possible if she had been willing to 

^ Marquardt, Staatsverwaltung, ii. pp. 107, 110 foil. A modius, which 
= nearly a peck, contained about 20 lb. of -wheat (Pliny, N. E. zviii. 66). 
Four and a half modii x 20 = 90 lb. 

^ Hirschfeld, VerwaHungsbeamten, ed. 2, p. 231 ; Strabo, p. 652 (Rhodes). 

' Caesar, £. C. iii. 42. 3. 



36 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

let them starve, but probably in no other way. 'To 
attempt to put them out upon the land again was 
hopeless ; they knew nothing of agriculture, and were 
unused to manual labour, which they despised.^, 

Thus ever since Rome had been a city of any size 
it had been the duty of the plebeian aediles to see 
that it was adequately supplied with corn, and in times 
of dearth or other difficulty these magistrates had to 
take special measures to procure it. With a popula- 
tion steadily rising since the war with Hannibal, and 
after the acquisition of two corn-growing provinces, 
to which Africa was added in 146 B.C., it was natural 
that they should turn their attention more closely 
to the resources of these ; and now the provincial 
governors had to see that the necessary amount of 
corn was furnished from these provinces at a fixed 
price, and that a low one.^ In 123 B.C. Gains 
Gracchus took the matter in hand, and made it 
a part of his whole far-reaching political scheme. 
The plebs urbana had become a very awkward element 
in the calculations of a statesman, and to have it in 
a state of starvation, or even fearing such a state, was 
dangerous in the extreme, as every Roman states- 
man had to learn in the course of the two following 
centuries. The aediles, we may guess, were quite 
unequal to the work demanded of them ; and at times 
victorious provincial governors would bring home great 
quantities of corn and give it away gratis for their 
private purposes, with bad results both economic and 

* Marquardt, op. cit. p. 110. 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 37 

moral. Gracchus saw that the work of supply needed 
a thorough organisation in regard to production, 
transport, warehousing, and finance, and set about it 
with a delight in hard work such as no Roman states- 
man had shown before, believing that if the people 
could be fed cheaply and regularly, they would cease 
to be "a troublesome neighbour."^ We do not 
know the details of his scheme of organisation except 
in one particular, the price at which the corn was to 
be sold per modius (peck) : this was to be six and i 
one-third asses, or rather less than half the normal { 
market-price of the day, so far as it can be made out. 
"Whether he believed that the cost of production 
could be brought down to this level by regularity of 
demand and transport we cannot tell ; it seems at 
any rate probable that he had gone carefully into 
the financial aspect of the business.^ But there can 
hardly be a doubt that he miscalculated, and that ] 
the result of the law by which he sought to effect his 
object was a yearly loss to the treasury, so that after 
his time, and until his law was repealed by Sulla, the 
people were really being fed largely at the expense, 
of the State, and thus lapsing into a state of semi- 
pauperism, with bad ethical consequences. 

One of these consequences was that inconsiderate 
statesmen would only too readily seize the chance of 
reducing the price of the corn still lower, as was done 
by Saturninus in 100 B.C., for political purposes. To 

^ For Gracchus' motives see a paper by the present writer in the English 
Historical Review for 1905, p. 221 foil. ^ cic. Tusc. Disp. iii. 20. 48. 



38 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

prevent this Sulla abolished the Gracchan system in 
toto; "but it was renewed in 73 B.C., and in 58 the 
demagogue P. Clodius made the distribution of corn 
gratuitous. In 46 Caesar found that no less than 
320,000 persons were receiving com from the State 
for nothing ; by a bill, of which we still possess a part,^ 
he reduced the number to 150,000, and by a rigid 
system of rules, of which we know something, con- 
trived to ensure that it should be kept at that point. 
"With the policy of Augustus and his successors in 
regard to the corn -supply (annona) I am not here 
concerned ; but it is necessary to observe that with 
the establishment of the Empire the plebs urbana 
ceased to be of any importance in politics, and could 
be treated as a petted population, from whom no 
harm was to be expected if they were kept comfort- 
able and amused. Augustus seems to have found 
himself compelled to take up this attitude towards 
them, and he was able to do so because he had 
thoroughly reorganised the public finance and knew 
what he could afford for the purpose. But in the 
time of Cicero the people were still powerful in 
legislation and elections, and the public finance was 
disorganised and in confusion ; and the result was 
that the corn-supply was mixed up with politics,^ and 
handled by reckless politicians in a way that was 
as ruinous to the treasury as it was to the moral 

^ Lex Julia municipalis, 1-20, compared with Suetonius, Jul. 41. 
^ A good example will be found in Cic. ad Att. iv. 1. 6 foil. ; the first 
letter written by Cicero after his return from exile. 



II THE LOWER POPULATION 39 

welfare of the city. The whole story, from Gracchus 
onwards, is a wholesome lesson on the mischief of 
granting "outdoor relief" in any form whatever, 
without instituting the means of inquiry into each 
individual case. Gracchus' intentions were doubtless 
honest and good; but "ubi semel recto deerratum 
est, in praeceps pervenitur." 

The drink of the Eoman was water, but he mixed 
it with wine whenever he had the chance. Fortu- 
nately for him he had no other intoxicating drink ; 
we hear neither of beer nor spirits in Eoman literature. 
Italy was well suited to the cultivation of the vine ; 
and though down to the last century of the Republic 
the choice kinds of wine came chiefly from Greece, 
yet we have unquestionable proof that wine was 
made in the neighbourhood of Rome at the very 
outset of Roman history. In the oldest religious 
calendar^ we find two festivals called Vinalia, one 
in April and the other in August ; what exactly was 
the relation of each of them to the operations of 
viticulture is by no means clear, but we know that 
these operations were under the protection of Jupiter, 
and that his priest, the Flamen Dialis, ofi'ered to him 
the first-fruits of the vintage. The production of 
rough wine must indeed have been large, for we 
happen to know that it was at times remarkably 
cheap. In 250 B.C., in many ways a wonderfully 
productive year, wine was sold at an as the congius, 
which is nearly three quarts ; ^ under the early 

^ See my jRoman Festivals, pp. 85 and 204. ^ PHny^ JVa^. jfigt, xviii. 17. 



40 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Empire Columella (iii. 3. 10) reckoned tlie amphora 
(nearly 6 gallons) at 15 sesterces, i.e. about eigiitpence. 
That the common citizen did expect to be able to 
qualify his water with wine seems proved by a story 
told by Suetonius, that when the people complained 
to Augustus that the price of wine was too high, he 
curtly and wisely answered that Agrippa had but lately 
given them an excellent water-supply.^ It looks as 
though they were claiming to have wine as well as grain 
supplied them by the government at a low price or 
gratuitously; but this was too much even for Augustus. 
For his water the Eoman, it need hardly be said, 
paid nothing. On the whole, at the time of which 
we are speaking he was fairly well supplied with it ; 
but in this, as in so many other matters of urban 
administration, it was under Augustus that an 
abundant supply was first procured and maintained 
by an excellent system of management. Frontinus, 
to whose work de Aqueductihus we owe almost all 
that we know about the Eoman water-supply, tells 
us that for four hundred and forty -one years after 
the foundation of the city the Eomans contented 
themselves with such water as they could get from 
the Tiber, from wells, and from natural springs, and 
adds that some of the springs were in his day still 
held in honour on account of their health -giving 
qualities.^ Cicero describes Eome, in his idealising 

^ Suet. Aug. 42. 

^ Frontinus i. 4. The date of his work is towards the end of the first 
century a.d. 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 41 

way, as " locum fontibus abundantem," and twenty- 
three springs are known to have existed ; but as early 
as 312 B.C. it was found necessary to seek elsewhere 
for a purer and more regular supply. More than six 
miles from Rome, on the via Collatina, springs were 
found and utilised for this purpose, which have lately 
been re- discovered at the bottom of some stone 
quarries ; and hence the water was brought by 
underground pipes along the line of the same road 
to the city, and through it to the foot of the 
Aventine, the plebeian quarter. This was the Aqua 
Appia, named after the famous censor Appius 
Claudius Caecus, whom Mommsen has shown to have 
been a friend of the people.^ Forty years later 
another censor, Manius Curius Dentatus, brought a 
second supply, also by an underground channel, from 
the river Anio near Tibur (Tivoli), the water of 
which, never of the first quality, was used for the 
irrigation of gardens and the flushing of drains. In 
144 B.C. it was found that these two old aqueducts 
were out of repair and insufficient, and this time a 
praetor, Q. Marcius Rex (probably through the influ- 
ence of a family cHque), was commissioned to set 
them in order and to procure a fresh supply. He 
went much farther than his predecessors had gone 
for springs, and drew a volume of excellent and clear 
cold water from the Sabine hills beyond Tibur, thirty- 
six miles from the city, which had the highest repu- 

^ See Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations, p. 48 ; Mommsen, Hist. vol. i. 
Appendix. 



42 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

tation at all times ; and for the last six miles of its 
course it was carried above ground upon a series of 
arches.^ One other aqueduct was added in 125 B.C., 
the Aqua Tepula, so called because its water was 
unusually warm; and the whole amount of water 
entering E,ome in the last century of the Eepublic is 
estimated at more than 700,000 cubic metres per 
diem, which would amply suffice for a population of 
half a million. At the present day Rome, with a 
population of 450,000, receives from all sources only 
379,000.^ Baths, both public and private, were 
already beginning to come into fashion ; of these 
more will be said later on. The water for drinkinof 

o 

was collected in large castella, or reservoirs, and 
thence distributed into public fountains, of which one 
still survives — the " Trofei di Mario," in the Piazza 
Vittorio Emmanuele on the Esquiline.^ When the 
supply came to be large enough, the owners of insulae 
and domus were allowed to have water laid on by 
private pipes, as we have it in modern towns ; but it 
is not certain when this permission was first given. 

3. But we must return to the individual Roman 
of the masses, whom we have now seen well supplied 
with the necessaries of life, and try to form some 

^ Frontinus i. 7, whose account is confirmed by the recently discovered 
Epitomes of Livy's lost books. — Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 
iv. 113. 

^ See the useful table in Lanciani, op. cit. 58. 

3 This dates from the reign of Domitian. The nature of the public 
fountain may be realised at Pompeii. See Mau, Pompeii, its Life and Art, 
p. 224 foil. 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 43 

idea of the way in which he was employed, or earned 
a living. This is by no means an easy task, for 
these small people, as we have already seen, did not 
interest their educated fellow -citizens, and for this 
reason we hear hardly anything of them in the 
literature of the time. Not only a want of phil- 
anthropic feeling in their betters, but an inherited 
contempt for all small industry and retail dealing, 
has helped to hide them away from us : an inherited 
contempt, because it is in fact a survival from an 
older social system, when the citizen did not need the 
work of the artisan and small retailer, but supplied 
all his own wants within the circle of his household, 
i.e. his own family and slaves, and produced on his 
farm the material of his food and clothing. And the 
survival was all the stronger, because even in the late 
Republic the abundant supply of slaves enabled the 
man of capital still to dispense largely with the 
services of the tradesman and artisan. 

Cicero expresses this contempt for the artisan and 
trading classes in more than one striking passage. 
One, in his treatise on Duties, is probably paraphrased 
from the Greek of Panaetius, the philosopher who 
first introduced Stoicism to the Romans, and modified 
it to suit their temperament, but it is quite clear 
that Cicero himself entirely endorses the Stoic view. 
" All gains made by hired labourers," he says, " are 
dishonourable and base, for what we buy of them is 
their labour, not their artistic skill : with them the 
very gain itself does but increase the slavishness of 



44 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

tlie work. All retail dealing too may be put in 
the same category, for the dealer will gain nothing 
except by profuse lying, and nothing is more dis- 
graceful than untruthful huckstering. Again, the 
work of all artisans {ppifices) is sordid ; there can be 
nothing honourable in a workshop." ^ 

If this view of the low character of the work 
of the artisan and retailer should be thought too 
obviously a Greek one, let the reader turn to the 
description by Livy ^ — a true gentleman — of the low 
origin of Terentius Varro, the consul who was in 
command at Cannae ; he uses the same language as 
Cicero. "He sprang from an origin not merely 
humble but sordid : his father was a butcher, who 
sold his own meat, and employed his son in this 
slavish business." The story may not be true, and 
indeed it is not a very probable one, but it well 
represents the inherited feeling towards retail trade of 
the Roman of the higher classes of society, — a feeling 
so tenacious of life, that even in modern England, 
where it arose from much the same causes as in the 
ancient world, it has only within the last century 
begun to die out.^ 

Yet in Rome these humble workers existed and 
made a living for themselves from the very be- 
ginning, as far as we can guess, of real city life. 
They are the necessary and inevitable product of the 
growth of a town population, and of the resulting 

^ Cic. de Officiis, i. 42. 150. ^ Liyy xxii. 25 ad fin. 

^ It is very conspicuous, e.g., in the novels of Jane Austen. 



II THE LOWER POPULATION 45 

division of labour. ^ The following passage from a 
work on industrial organisation in England may be 
taken as closely representing tbe same process in 
early Eome : ^ " The town arose as a centre in which 
the surplus produce of many villages could be profit- 
ably disposed of by exchange. Trade thus became 
a settled occupation, and trade prepared the way for 
the establishment of the handicrafts, by furnishing 
capital for the support of the craftsmen, and by 
creating a regular market for their products. It was 
possible for a great many bodies of craftsmen, — the 
weavers, tailors, butchers, bakers, etc., to find a liveli- 
hood, each craft devoting itself to the supply of a 
single branch of those wants which the village house- 
hold had attempted very imperfectly to satisfy by its 
own labours." 

As in mediaeval Europe, so in early Rome, the 
same conditions produced the same results : we find 
the craftsmen of the town forming themselves into 
gilds, not only for the protection of their trade, but 
from a natural instinct of association, and providing 
these gilds, on the model of the older groups of 
family and gens, with a religious centre and a patron 
deity. The gilds {collegia) of Eoman craftsmen were 
attributed to Numa, like so many other religious 
institutions ; they included associations of weavers, 
fullers, dyers, shoemakers, doctors, teachers, painters, 
etc.,^ and were mainly devoted to Minerva as the 

^ G. Unwin, Industrial Organisation, etc., p. 2. 
a Plutarch, Numa, 17 ; Ovid, Fasti, iii. 819 foil. 



46 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

deity of handiwork. " The society that witnessed 
the coming of Minerva from Etruria . . . little 
knew that in her temple on the Aventine was being 
brought to expression the trade-union idea." ^ These 
collegia opificum, most unfortunately, pass entirely 
out of our sight, until they reappear in the age of 
Cicero in a very different form, as clubs used for 
political purposes, but composed still of the lowest 
strata of the free population {collegia sodalicia)} 
The history and causes of their disappearance and 
metamorphosis are lost to us ; but it is not hard 
to guess that the main cause is to be found in the 
great economic changes that followed the Hannibalic 
war, — the vast number of slaves imported, and the 
consequent resuscitation of the old system of the 
economic independence of the great households ; the 
decay of religious practice, which affected both public 
and private life in a hundred different ways ; and that 
steady growth of individualism which is character- 
istic of eras of toAvn life, and especially of the last 
three centuries B.C. It is curious to notice that by 
the time these old gilds emerge into light again as 
clubs that could be used for political purposes, a new 
source of gain, and one that was really sordid, had 
been placed within the reach of the Roman plebs 
urbana : it was possible to make money by your vote 
in the election of magistrates. In that degenerate 

^ J. B. Carter, The Religion of Numa, p. 48. 

"^ Marq. iii. p. 138. See also Kornemann's article "Collegium" in Pauly- 
Wissowa, Real-EncyTcl., and Waltzing, Corporations prqfessionelles chez les 
Romains, i. p. 78 foil. 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 47 

age, when tlie vast accumulation of capital made it 
possible for a man to purchase his way to power, in 
spite of repeated attempts to check the evil by 
legislation, the old principle of honourable association 
was used to help the small man to make a living by 
choosing the unprincipled and often the incompetent 
to undertake the government of the Empire. 

Apart, however, from such illegal means of making 
money, there was beyond doubt in the Eome of the last 
century B.C. a large amount of honest and useful labour 
done by free citizens. We must not run away with the 
idea that the whole labour of the city was performed 
by slaves, who ousted the freeman from his chance 
of a living. There was indeed a certain number of 
public slaves who did public work for the State ; 
but on the whole the great mass of the servile popula- 
tion worked entirely within the households and on 
the estates of the rich, and did not interfere to any 
sensible degree with the labour of the small freeman. 
As has been justly observed by Salvioli,^ never at any 
period did the Eoman proletariat complain of the 
competition of slave labour as detrimental to its own 
interests. Had there been no slave labour there, the 
small freeman might indeed have had a wider field of 
enterprise, and have been better able to accumulate 
a small capital by undertaking work for the great 
families, which was done, as it was, by their slaves. 
But he was not aware of this, and the two kinds of 
labour, the paid and the unpaid, went on side by side 

^ Le Capitalisme, etc., p. 144 foil. 



48 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

without active rivalry. No doubt slavery helped to 
foster idleness, as it did in the Southern States of 
America before the Civil War ; ^ no doubt there were 
plenty of idle ruffians in the city, ready to steal, to 
murder, or to hire themselves out as the armed 
followers of a political desperado like Clodius ; but 
the simple necessities of the life of those who had no 
slaves of their own gave employment, we may be 
certain, to a great number of free tradesmen and 
artisans and labourers of a more unskilled kind. 

To begin with, we may ask the pertinent question, 
how the corn sold cheap by the State was made into 
bread for the small consumer, Pliny gives us very 
valuable information, which we may accept as roughly 
correct, that until the year 171 B.C. there were no 
bakers in Rome.^ " The Quirites," he says, " made 
their own bread, which was the business of the women, 
as it is still among most peoples." The demand 
which was thus supplied by a new trade was no doubt 
caused by the increase of the lower population of 
the city, by the return of old soldiers, often perhaps 
unmarried, and by the manumission of slaves, many 
of whom would also be inexperienced in domestic life 
and its needs ; and we may probably connect it with 
the growth of the system of insulae, the great lodging- 
houses in which it would not be convenient either to 
grind your corn or to bake your bread. So the bakers, 
called pistores from the old practice of pounding the 

^ CairneB, Slave Power, pp. 78, 143 foil. See below, p. 235. 
^ Pliny, Nat. Hist, xviii. 107. 



11 THE LOWER POPULATION 49 

grain in a mortar (pingere), soon, became a very- 
important and flourishing section of the plebs, though 
never held in high repute ; and in connexion with 
the distributions of corn some of them probably rose 
above the level of the small tradesman, like the pistor 
recZempforV^arcus Vergilius Eurysaces, whose monu- 
ment has come down to us/ It should be noted 
that the trade of the baker included the grinding of 
the corn ; there were no millers at Eome. This can 
be well illustrated from the numerous bakers' shops 
which have been excavated at Pompeii.^ In one of 
these, for example, we find the four mills in a large 
apartment at the rear of the building, and close 
by is the stall for the donkeys that turned them, 
and also the kneading -room, oven, and store-room. 
Small bakeries may have had only hand-mills, like 
the one with which we saw the peasant in the 
Moretum grinding his corn ; but the donkey was 
from quite early times associated with the business, 
as we know from the fact that at the festival of 
Vesta, the patron deity of all bakers, they were 
decorated with wreaths and cakes. ^ 

The baking trade must have given employment 
to a large number of persons. So beyond doubt did 
the supply of vegetables, which were brought into 
the city from gardens outside, and formed, after the 
corn, the staple food of the lower classes. We have 

1 C.I.L. i. 1013. The date is possibly pre- Augustan, 

2 Mau's Pompeii, p. 380. 

3 See my Roman Festivals, p. 148. For the mills of various kinds see 
also Marquardt, Privatlehen, p. 405. 



50 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

already seen in the Moretum the countryman adding 
to his store of bread by a hotch-potch made of 
vegetables, and the reader of the poem will have 
been astonished at the number mentioned, including 
garden herbs for flavouring purposes. The ancients 
were fully alive to the value of vegetable food and 
of fruit as a healthy diet in warm climates, and 
the wonderfully full information we have on this 
subject comes from medical writers like Galen, as well 
as from Pliny's Natural History, and from the writers 
on agriculture. The very names of some Eoman 
families, e.g. the Fabii and Caepiones, carry us back 
to a time when beans and onions, which later on were 
not so much in favour, were a regular part of the 
diet of the Eoman people. The list of vegetables 
and herbs which we know of as consumed fills a 
whole page in Marquardt's interesting account of this 
subject, and includes most of those which we use at 
the present day.^ It was only when the consumption 
of meat and game came in with the growth of capital 
and its attendant luxury, that a vegetarian diet came 
to be at all despised. This is another result of 
the economic changes caused by the Hannibalic war, 
and is curiously illustrated by the speech of the cook 
of a great household in the Pseudolus of Plautus, 
who prides himself on not being as other cooks are, 
who make the guests into beasts of the field, stuffing 
them with all kinds of food which cattle eat, and 
even with things which cattle would refuse ! ^ But 

^ Privatlehen, p, 409. ^ Pseudohis, 810 foil. 



u THE LOWER POPULATION 51 

we may take it that at all times the Eoman of the 
lower class consumed fruit and vegetables largely, 
and thus gave employment to a number of market- 
gardeners and small purveyors. Fish he did not eat ; 
like meat, it was too expensive ; in fact fish-eating 
only came in towards the end of the republican 
period, and then only as a luxury for those who could 
afford to keep fish-ponds on their estates. How far 
the supply of other luxuries, such as butchers' meat, 
gave employment to freemen, is not very clear ; and 
perhaps we need here only take account of such 
few other products, e.g. oil and wine, as were in 
universal demand, though not always procurable by 
the needy. There were plenty of small shops in 
Eome where these things were sold ; we have a 
picture of such a shop (caupona) in another of the 
minor Virgilian poems, the Copa, i.e. hostess, or per- 
haps in this case the woman who danced and sang 
for the entertainment of the guests. She plied her 
trade in a smoky tavern (fumosa taberna), all the 
contents of which are charmingly described in the 
poem.^ 

Let us now see how the other chief necessity of 
human life, the supply of clothing, gave employment 
to the free Roman shopkeeper. 

The clothing of the whole Roman population was 
originally woollen ; both the outer garment, the toga, 
and the inner (tunica) were of this material, and the 

^ Cp. the uncta popina of Horace, Epist, i. 14. 21 foil. Scene in a wine- 
shop at Pompeii, Man, p. 395. 



52 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

sheep which supplied it were pastured well and 
conveniently in all the higher hilly regions of Italy. 
Other materials, linen, cotton, and silk, came in later 
with the growth of commerce, but the manufacture 
of these into clothing was chiefly carried on by slaves 
in the great households, and we need not take any 
account of them here. The preparation of wool too 
was in well regulated households undertaken even 
under the Empire by the women of the family, 
including the materfamilias herself, and in many an 
inscription we find the lanificium recorded as the 
honourable practice of matrons.^ But as in the case 
of food, so with the simple material of clothing, it 
was soon found impossible in a city for the poorer 
citizens to do all that was necessary within their 
own houses ; this is proved conclusively by the 
mention of gilds of fullers^ (fullones) among those 
traditionally ascribed to Numa. Fulling is the 
preparation of cloth by cleansing in water after it 
has come from the loom; but the fuller's trade of 
the later republic probably often comprised the 
actual manufacture of the wool for those who could 
not do it themselves. He also acted as the washer 
of garments already in use, and this was no doubt a 
very important part of his business, for in a warm 
climate heavy woollen material is naturally apt to 
get frequently impure and unwholesome. Soap was 

^ See, e.g., the Laudatio Turiae, C.I.L. vi. i. 1527, line 30. 
2 Only very rich families employed their own fullers. — Marq. Privat- 
leben, p. 512, 



n THE LOWER POPULATION 53 

not known till the first century of the Empire, and 
the process of cleansing was all the more lengthy 
and elaborate ; the details of the process are known 
to us from paintings at Pompeii, where they adorn 
the walls of fulleries which have been excavated. 
A plan of one of them will be found in Mau's 
Pompeii, p. 388. The ordinary woollen garments 
were simply bleached white, not dyed ; and though 
dyers are mentioned among the ancient gilds by 
Plutarch, it is probable that he means chiefly fullers 
by the Greek word ^a^eh. 

Of the manufacture of leather we do not know so 
much. This, like that of wool, must have originally 
been carried on in the household, but it is mentioned 
as a trade as early as the time of Plant us. ^ The 
shoemakers' business was, however, a common one 
from the earliest times, probably because it needs 
some technical skill and experience ; the most natural 
division of labour in early societies is sure to produce 
this trade. The shoemakers' gild was among the 
earliest, and had its centre in the atrium sutorium ; ^ 
and the individual shoemakers carried on their trade 
in booths or shops. The Roman shoe, it may be 
mentioned here, was of several different kinds, 
according to the sex, rank, and occupation of the 
wearer ; but the two most important sorts were the 
calceus, the shoe worn with the toga in the city, and 

^ Menaechmi, 404 : this may, however, be only a translation from the 
Greek, 

2 CI.L. i. p. 389. 



54 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

the mark of the Eoman citizen ; and the pero or high 
boot, which was more serviceable in the country. 

Among the old gilds were also those of the smiths 
(fahri ferrarii) and the potters [figuli), but of these 
little need be said here, for they were naturally fewer 
in number than the vendors of food and clothing, 
and the raw material for their work had, in later 
times at least, to be brought from a distance. The 
later Eomans seem to have procured their iron -ore 
from the island of Elba and Spain, Gaul, and other 
provinces,^ and to have imported ware of all kinds, 
especially the finer sorts, from various parts of the 
Empire; the commoner kinds, such as the dolia or 
large vessels for storing wine and oil, were certainly 
made in Eome in the second century B.C., for Cato 
in his book on agriculture^ remarks that they could 
be best procured there. But both these manufactures 
require a certain amount of capital, and we may 
doubt whether the free population was largely 
employed in them ; we know for certain that in the 
early Empire the manufacture of ware, tiles, bricks, 
etc., was carried on by capitalists, some of them of 
noble birth, including even Emperors themselves, and 
beyond doubt the " hands " they employed were 
chiefly slaves.^ 

But industries of this kind may serve to remind 

^ Marquardt, Privatlehen, p. 693 and refif. 

^ Cato, de re rustica, 135 ; a very interesting chapter, which shows that 
of the farmer's "plant," clothing, rugs, carts as well as dolia, were best 
purchased at Rome. 

2 Marq. Privatleben, p. 645. 



u THE LOWER POPULATION 55 

us of another kind of employment in which the lower 
classes of Eome and Ostia may have found the means 
of making a living. The importation of raw materials, 
and that of goods of all kinds, which was constantly 
on the increase throughout Koman history, called for 
the employment of vast numbers of porters, carriers, 
and what we should call dock hands, working both 
at Ostia, where the heavier ships were unladed or 
relieved of part of their cargoes in order to enable 
them to come up the Tiber, ^ and also at the wharves 
at Rome under the Aventine. We must also re- 
member that almost all porterage in the city had to 
be done by men, with the aid of mules or donkeys ; 
the streets were so narrow that in trying to picture 
what they looked like we must banish from our 
minds the crowds of vehicles familiar in a modern 
city. Julius Caesar, in his regulations for the 
government of the city of Rome, forbade waggons 
to be driven in the streets in the day-time.^ Even 
supposing that a large amount of porterage was done 
by slaves for their masters, we may reasonably guess 
that free labour was also employed in this way at 
Rome, as was certainly the case at Ostia, and also 
at Pompeii, where the pack -carriers (saccarii) and 
mule-drivers (muliones) are among the corporations 
of free men who have left in the form of graffiti 
appeals to voters to support a particular candidate 
for election to a magistracy.^ 

1 Strabo, p. 231, 2 Lex Julia Municipalis, line 56 foil, 

* Mau, Pompeii, p. 377. 



56 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Thus we may safely conclude that there was a 
very considerable amount of employment in Rome 
available for the poorer citizens, quite apart from the 
labour performed by slaves. But before closing this 
chapter it is necessary to point out the precarious 
conditions under which that employment was carried 
on, as compared with the industrial conditions of a 
modern city. It is true enough that the factory 
system of modern times, with the sweating, the long 
hours of work, and the unwholesome surroundings of 
our industrial towns, has produced much misery, 
much physical degeneracy ; and we have also the 
problem of the unemployed always with us. But 
there were two points in which the condition of the 
free artisan and tradesman at Rome was far worse 
than it is with us, and rendered him liable to an 
even more hopeless submersion than that which is 
too often the fate of the modern wage-earner. 

First, let us consider that markets, then as now, 
were liable to fluctuation, — probably more liable then 
than now, because the supply both of food and of 
the raw material of manufacture was more precarious 
owing to the greater difficulties of conveyance. 
Trade would be bad at times, and many things might 
happen which would compel the man with little or 
no capital to borrow money, which he could only do 
on the security of his stock, or indeed, as the law of 
Rome still recognised, of his person. Money-lenders 
were abundant, as we shall find in the next chapter, 
interest was high, and to fall into the hands of a 



II THE LOWER POPULATION 57 

money-lender was only another step on the way to 
destruction. At the present day, if a tradesman fails 
in business, he can appeal to a merciful bankruptcy 
law, which gives him every chance to satisfy his 
creditors and to start afresh ; or in the case of a 
single debt, he can be put into a county court where 
every chance is given him to pay it within a reason- 
able time. All this machinery, most of which (to the 
disgrace of modern civilisation) is quite recent in 
date, was absent at Kome. The only magistrates 
administering the civil law were the praetors, and 
though since the reforms of Sulla there were usually 
eight of these in the city, we can well imagine how 
hard it would be for the poor debtor in a huge city 
to get his affairs attended to. Probably in most 
cases the creditor worked his will with him, took 
possession of his property without the interference of 
the law, and so submerged him, or even reduced him 
to slavery. If he chose to be merciful he could go 
to the praetor, and get what was called a missio 
in hona, i.e. a legal right to take the whole of his 
debtor's property, waiving the right to his person. 
And it must be noted that no more humane law 
of bankruptcy was introduced until the time of 
Augustus. No wonder that at least three times in 
the last century of the Republic there arose a cry for 
the total abolition of debts (tabulae novae): in 88 B.C., 
after the Social War ; in 63, during Cicero's consul- 
ship, when political and social revolutionary projects 
were combined in the conspiracy of Catiline ; and in 



58 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

48, when the economic condition of Italy had been 
disturbed by the Civil War, and Caesar had much 
difficulty in keeping unprincipled agitators from 
applying violent and foolish remedies. But to this 
we shall return in the next chapter. 

Secondly, let us consider that in a large city of 
to-day the person and property of all, rich or poor, 
are adequately protected by a sound system of police, 
and by courts of first instance which are sitting every 
day. Assault and murder, theft and burglary, are 
exceptional. It might be going too far to say that 
at Eome they were the rule ; but it is the fact that 
in what we may call the slums of Eome there was no 
machinery for checking them. No such machinery 
had been invented, because according to the old rules 
of law, still in force, a father might punish his 
children, a master his slaves, and a murderer or thief 
might be killed by his intended victim if caught 
red-handed. This rude justice would suffice in a 
small city and a simple social system ; but it would 
be totally inadequate to protect life and property in 
a huge population, such as that of the Eome of the 
last century B.C. Since the time of Sulla there had 
indeed been courts for the trial of crimes of violence, 
and at all times the consuls with their staff of 
assistants had been charged with the peace of the 
city ; but we may well ask whether the poor Eoman 
of Cicero's day could really benefit either by the 
consular imperium or the action of the Sullan courts. 
A slave was the object of his master's care, and theft 



THE LOWER POPULATION 59 

from a slave was theft from his owner, — if injured 
or murdered satisfaction could be had for him. But 
in that age of slack and sordid government it is at 
least extremely doubtful whether either the person or 
the property of the lower class of citizen could be 
said to have been properly protected in the city. 
And the same anarchy prevailed all over Italy, — 
from the suburbs of Eome, infested by robbers, to the 
sheep-farm of the great capitalist, where the traveller 
might be kidnapped by runaway slaves, to vanish 
from the sight of men without leaving a trace of 
his fate. 

It is the great merit of Augustus that he made 
Rome not only a city of marble, but one in which 
the person and property of all citizens were fairly 
secure. By a new and rational bankruptcy law, and 
by a well -organised system of police, he made life 
endurable even for the poorest. If he initiated a 
policy which eventually spoilt and degraded the 
Roman population, if he failed to encourage free 
industry as persistently as it seems to us that he 
might have done, he may perhaps be in some degree 
excused, as knowing the conditions and difficulties of 
the problem before him better than we can know 
them. 



CHAPTER III 

THE MEN OP BUSINESS AND THEIR METHODS 

The highest class in the social scale at Rome was 
divided, roughly rather than exactly, into two 
sections, according as they did or did not aim at 
being elected to magistracies and so entering the 
senate. To the senatorius ordo, which will be dealt 
with in the next chapter, belonged all senators, and 
all sons of senators whether or no they had as yet 
been elected to the quaestorship, which after Sulla 
was the magistracy qualifying for the senate. But 
outside the senatorial ranks there were numbers of 
wealthy and well educated men, most of whom were 
engaged in one way or another in business ; by 
which term is here meant, not so much trading and 
mercantile operations, as banking, money-lending, the 
undertaking of State contracts, and the raising of 
taxes. The general name for this class was, strange 
to say, equites, or knights, as they are often but 
unfortunately called in modern histories of Rome. 
They were in fact at this time the most unmilitary 
part of the population, and they inherited the title 
only because the property qualification for the equites 

60 



CHAP. Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 6i 

equo private, i.e. the cavalry who served with their 
own horses, had been taken as the qualification also 
for equestrian judices, to whom Gains Gracchus had 
given the decision of cases in the quaestio de repe- 
tundis.^ This law of Gracchus had had the result of 
constituting an ordo equester alongside of the ordo 
senatorius, with a property qualification of 400,000 
sesterces, or about £3200, not of income but of 
capital. Any one who had this sum could call 
himself an eques, provided he were not a senator, 
even if he had never served in the cavalry or 
mounted a horse. 

We are concerned here with the business which 
these men carried on, not with their history as a 
body in the State ; this latter difficult subject has 
been handled by Dr. Greenidge in his Roman Public 
Life, and by many other writers. We have to take 
them here as the representatives of capital and the 
chief uses to which it was put in the age of Cicero ; 
for, as a matter of fact, they were then doing by far 
the greatest part of the money-making of the Empire. 
They were not indeed always doing it for themselves ; 
they often represented men of senatorial rank, and 
acted as their agents in the investment of money and 
in securing the returns due. For the senator was not 
allowed, by the strict letter of the law, to engage in 
business which would take him out of Italy ; ^ his 
services were needed at home, and if indeed he had 

* See Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 225. 
* Lex Claudia ; Livy xxi. 63. 



62 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

performed his proper work with industry and energy 
he never could have found time to travel on his own 
business. At the time of which we are speaking 
there were ways in which he could escape from his 
duties, — ways only too often used ; but many sena- 
tors did undoubtedly employ members of the eques- 
trian order to transact their business abroad, so that 
it is not untrue to say that the equites had in their 
hands almost the whole of the monetary business of 
the Empire. 

The property qualification may seem to us small 
enough, but it is of course no real index to the 
amount of capital which a wealthy eques might 
possess. Nothing is more astonishing in the history 
of the last century of the republic than the vast sums 
of money in the hands of individuals, and the 
enormous sums lent and borrowed in private by the 
men whose names are familiar to us as statesmen. 
It is told of Caesar that as a very young man 
he owed a sum equivalent to about £280,000 ; of 
Crassus that he had 200 million sesterces invested in 
land alone.^ Cicero, though from time to time in 
difficulties, always found it possible to borrow the 
large sums which he spent on houses, libraries, etc. 
These are men of the ordo senatorius ; of the equites 
proper, the men who dealt rather in lending than 
borrowing, we have not such explicit accounts, because 
they were not in the same degree before the public. 
But of Atticus, the type of the best and highest 

^ Plut. Crassus, 2 ; Pliny, iV. S. xxxiii. 134 : equivalent to about £160,000. 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 63 

section of the ordo equester, and of the amount and 
the sources of his wealth, we happen to know a good 
deal from the little biography of him written by his 
contemporary and friend Cornelius Nepos, taken to- 
gether with Cicero's numerous letters to him. His 
father had left him the moderate fortune of £16,000. 
With this he bought land, not in Italy but in Epirus, 
where it was probably to be had cheap. The profits 
arising from this land, with which he took no doubt 
much trouble and pains, he invested again in other 
ways. He lent money to Greek cities : to Athens indeed 
without claiming any interest ; to Sicyon without much 
hope of repayment ; but no doubt to many others 
at a large profit. He also undertook the publish- 
ing of books, buying slaves who were skilled copyists ; 
and in this, as in so many other ways, his friendship 
was of infinite value to Cicero. When we reflect 
that every highly educated man at this time owned a 
library and wished to have the last new book, we can 
understand how even this business might be extensive 
and profitable, and are not astonished to find Cicero 
asking Atticus to see that copies of his Greek book 
on his own consulship were to be had in Athens and 
other Greek towns. ^ This shrewd man also invested 
in gladiators, whom he could let out at a profit, as no 
doubt he would let out his library slaves.^ Lastly, 
he owned houses in Rome ; in fact he must have 
been making money in many difi"erent ways, spending 
but little himself, and attending personally and in- 

1 Cic. ad Alt. ii. 1. 2. 2 jrj_ ^^^ 4^ 



64 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

defatigably to all his business, as indeed with true and 
disinterested friendship he attended to that of Cicero. 
In him we see the best type of the Eoman business- 
man : not the bloated millionaire living in coarse 
luxury, but the man who loved to be always busy for 
himself or his friends, and whose knowledge of men 
and things was so thorough that he could make a 
fortune without anxiety to himself or discomfort to 
others. What amount of capital he realised in these 
various ways we do not know, but the mass of his 
fortune came to him after he had been pursuing them 
for many years, in the form of a legacy from an uncle. 
This uncle was a typical capitalist and money-lender 
of a much lower and coarser type than his nephew ; 
Nepos aptly describes him as " familiarem L. LucuUi, 
divitem, difficillima natural The nephew was the 
only man who could get on with this Peter Feather- 
stone of Roman life, and this simple fact tells us as 
much about the character and disposition of Atticus 
as anything in Cicero's correspondence with him. 
The happy result was that his uncle left him a sum 
which we may reckon at about £80,000 (centies 
sestertium),^ and henceforward he may be reckoned, if 
not as a millionaire, at any rate as a man of large 
capital, soundly invested and continually on the 
increase. 

There is no doubt then as to the fact of the 
presence of capital on a large scale in the Rome of the 
last century B.C., or of the business talents of many 

^ Corn. Nepos, Atticus, 5. 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 65 

of its holders, or again of the many profitable ways in 
which it might be invested. But in order to learn a 
little more of the history of capital at Eome, which is 
of the utmost importance for a proper understanding 
not only of the economic, but of the social and ethical 
characteristics of the age, it is necessary to go as far 
back as the war with Hannibal at least. 

That there had been surplus capital in the hands 
of individuals long before the war with Hannibal is 
a well known fact, proved by the old Eoman law of 
debt, and by the traditions of the unhappy relations 
of debtor and creditor. But in order not to go back 
too far, we may notice a striking fact which meets 
us at the very outset of that momentous war. In 
215 B.C., and again the next year, the treasury was 
almost empty ; then for the first time, so far as we 
know, private individuals came to the rescue, and 
lent large sums to the State ; ^ these were partners in 
certain associations to be described later on in this 
chapter, which had made money by undertaking State 
contracts in the previous wars. The presence of 
Hannibal in Italy strained the resources of the State 
to the utmost in every way; it cut the Eomans off 
from their supply of the precious metals, forced them 
to reduce the weight of the as to one ounce, and, 
curiously enough, also to issue gold coins for the first 
time, — a measure probably taken on account of the 
dearth of silver, — and to make use of the uncoined 
gold in the treasury or in private hands. At the end 

^ Livy xxiii. 49. 



66 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

of the war the supply of silver was recovered ; hence- 
forward all reckonings were made in silver, and the 
gold coinage was not long continued. 

At this happy time, when Rome felt that she 
could breathe again after the final defeat of her 
deadly enemy, began the great inpouring of wealth 
of which the capitalism of Cicero's time is the direct 
result. The chief sources of this wealth, so far 
as the State was concerned, were the indemnities 
paid by conquered peoples, especially Carthage and 
Antiochus of Syria, and the booty brought home by 
victorious generals. Of these Livy has preserved 
explicit accounts, and the best example is perhaps 
that of the booty brought by Scipio Asiaticus from 
Asia Minor in 189 B.C., of which Pliny remarks that 
it first introduced luxury into Italy. ^ It has been 
roughly computed that the total amount from in- 
demnities may be taken at six million of our pounds, 
in the period of the great wars of the second century 
B.C., and from booty very much the same sum. 
Besides this we have to take account of the produce 
of the Spanish silver mines, of which the Romans 
came into possession with the Carthaginian dominions 
in Spain ; the richest of these were near Carthago 
Nova, and Polybius tells us that in his day they 
employed 40,000 miners, and produced an immense 
revenue.^ 

^ Pliny, JV. E. xxxiii, 148 ; Livy xxxvii. 59. 

2 Polyb. xxxiv. 9, quoted by Strabo, p. 148. Cp. Livy xlv. 18 for valuable 
mines in Macedonia. 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 67 

All this went into the aerarium, except what 
was distributed out of the booty to the soldiers, 
both Romans and socii, the former naturally taking 
as a rule double the amount paid to the latter. 
But the influx of treasure into the State coffers soon 
began to tell upon the financial welfare of the whole 
citizen community ; the most striking proof of this 
is the fact that, in 167 B.C., after the second 
Macedonian war, the trihutum or property-tax was 
no longer imposed upon all citizens. Henceforward 
the Eoman citizen had hardly any burdens to bear 
except the necessity of military service, and there 
are very distinct signs that he was beginning to be 
unwilling to bear even that one. He saw the pro- 
minent men of his time enriching themselves abroad 
and leading luxurious lives, and the spirit of ease 
and idleness began inevitably to affect him too. 
Polybius indeed, writing about 140-130 B.C., declines 
to state positively that the great Eomans were 
corrupt or extortionate,^ and those who were his 
intimate friends, Aemilius Paullus and his sons, were 
distinguished for their " abstinentia " : but the mere 
occurrence of this word " abstinentia " in the epitomes 
of Livy's lost books which dealt with this time, 
betrays the fact too obviously. In 149 was passed 
the first of the long series of laws intended, but in 
vain, to check the tendency of provincial governors 
to extort money from their subjects ; and as this law 
established for the first time a standing court to try 

^ Polyb. xviii. 35. For the unwillingness to serve, Livy, Epit. 48 and 55. 



68 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

offences of this kind, the inference is inevitable that 
such offences were common and on the increase. 

The remarkable fact about this inpouring of wealth 
is its extraordinary suddenness. Within the Hfetime 
of a single individual, Cato the Censor, who died an 
old man in 149 B.C., the financial condition of the 
State and of individuals had undergone a complete 
change. Cato loved to make money and knew very 
well how to do it, as his own treatise on agriculture 
plainly shows ; but he wished to do it in a legitimate 
way, and to spend profitably the money he made, 
and he spared no pains to prevent others from 
making it illegally and spending it unprofitably. He 
saw clearly that the sudden influx of wealth was 
disturbing the balance of the Eoman mind, and that 
the desire to make money was taking the place of 
the idea of duty to the State. He knew that no 
Eoman could serve two masters. Mammon and the 
State, and that Mammon was getting the upper hand 
in his views of life. If the accumulation of wealth 
had been gradual instead of sudden, natural instead 
of artificial, this could hardly have happened ; as in 
England from the fourteenth century onwards, the 
steady growth of capital would have produced no 
ethical mischief, no false economic ideas, because it 
would have been an organic growth, resting upon a 
sound and natural economic basis. ^ As the French 
historian has said with singular felicity,^ " Money is 

^ Cunningham, Western Civilisation {Modern), p. 162 foil, 
2 Duruy, Hist, de Borne, vol. ii. p. 12. 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 69 

like the water of a river : if it suddenly floods, it 
devastates ; divide it into a thousand channels where 
it circulates quietly, and it brings life and fertility 
to every spot." 

It was in this period of the great wars, so un- 
wholesome and perilous economically, that the men 
of business, as defined at the beginning of this chapter 
— the men of capital outside the ordo senatorius — 
first rose to real importance. In the century that 
followed, and as we see them more especially in 
Cicero's correspondence, they became a great power 
in the State, and not only in Rome, but in every 
corner of the Empire. We have now to see how they 
gained this importance and this power, and what use 
they made of their capital and their opportunities. 
This is not usually explained or illustrated in the 
ordinary histories of Rome, yet it is impossible with- 
out explaining it to understand either the social or 
the public life of the Rome of this period. 

The men of business may be divided into two 
classes, according as they undertook work for the 
State or on their own account entirely. It does not 
follow that these two classes were mutually exclusive ; 
a man might very well invest his money in both 
kinds of undertaking, but these two kinds were 
totally distinct, and called by difierent names. A 
public undertaking was called publicum^ and the 
men who undertook it puhlicani ; a private under- 
taking was negotium, and all private business men 

^ Cic. de Promnciis consularibus. v. 12. 



70 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

were known as negotiatores. The publican! were 
always organised in joint-stock companies {societates 
puhlicanorum) ; the negotiatores might be in private 
partnership with one or more partners/ but as a rule 
seem to have been single individuals. We will deal 
first with the publicani. 

In a passage of Livy quoted just now it is 
stated that at the beginning of the Hannibalic war 
money was advanced to the State by societates 
publicanorum ; Livy also happens to mention that 
three of these competed for the privilege. Thus it 
is clear that the system of getting public work done 
by contract was in full operation before that date, 
together with the practice on the part of the con- 
tractors of uniting in partnerships to lessen the risk. 
System and practice are equally natural, and it needs 
but a little historical imagination to realise their 
development. As the Roman State became involved 
in wars leading to the conquest of Italy, and in due 
time to the acquisition of dominions beyond sea, 
armies and fleets had to be equipped and provisioned, 
roads had to be made, public rents to be got in, new 
buildings to be erected for public convenience or 
worship, corn had to be procured for the growing 
population, and, above all, taxes had to be collected 
both in Italy and in the provinces as these were 
severally acquired.^ The government had no ap- 

^ Cic. pro Quinctio 3. 12 ; a good case of partnership in a res pecuaria et 
rustica in Gaul. 

^ Examples in Livy xxiii. 49 ; xxxii. 7 (portoria) ; xxxviii. 35 (corn- 
supply) ; xliv. 16 (army) ; xHi. 9 (revenue of ager Campanus). 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 71 

paratus for carrying out these undertakings itself; 
it had not, as we have, separate departments or 
bureaux with a permanent staff of officials attached 
to each, and even if it had been so provided, it would 
still have found it most convenient, as modern 
governments also do, to get the necessary work 
carried out in most cases by private contractors. 
Every five years the censors let the various works by 
auction to contracting companies, who engaged to 
carry them out for fixed sums, and make what profit 
they could out of the business (censoria locatio). 
This saved an immense amount of trouble to the 
senate and magistrates, who were usually busily 
engaged in other matters ; nor was there at first any 
harm in the system, so long as the Eomans were 
morally sound, and incapable of jobbing or scamping 
their work. The very fact that they united into 
companies for the purpose of undertaking these 
contracts shows that they were aware of the risk 
involved, and wished as far as possible to neutralise 
it ; it did not mean greed for money, but rather 
anxiety not to lose the capital invested. 

But as Rome advanced her dominion in the second 
century B.C., and had to see to an ever -increasing 
amount of public business, it was discovered that the 
business of contracting was one which might indeed 
be risky, but with skill and experience, and especially 
with a trifle of unscrupulousness, might be made a 
perfectly safe and paying investment. This was 
especially the case with the undertakings for raising 



72 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

the taxes in the newly acquired provinces as well as 
in Italy, more particularly in those provinces, viz. 
Sicily and Asia, which paid their taxes in the form 
of tithe and not in a lump sum. The collection of 
these revenues could be made a very paying concern, 
seeing that it was not necessary to be too squeamish 
about the rights and claims of the provincials. And, 
indeed, by the time of the Gracchi all these joint-stock 
companies had become the one favourite investment 
in which every one who had any capital, however 
small, placed it without hesitation. Polybius, who 
was in Rome at this time for several years, and was 
thoroughly acquainted with Roman life, has left a 
valuable record in his sixth book (ch. xvii.) of the 
universal demand for shares in these companies ; a 
fact which proves that they were believed to be both 
safe and profitable. 

These societates were managed by the great men 
of business, as our joint-stock companies are directed 
by men of capital and consequence. Polybius tells 
us that among those who were concerned, some took 
the contracts from the censors : these were called 
mancipes, because the sign of accepting the contract 
at the auction was to hold up the hand.^ Others, 
Polybius goes on, were in association with these 
mancipes, and, as we may assume, equally responsible 
with them; these were the socii. It was of course 
necessary that security should be given for the ful- 
filment of the contract, and Polybius does not omit 

^ Festus, ed. Miiller, p. 151. 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 73 

to mention the praedes or guarantors/ Lastly, lie 
says that others again gave their property on behalf 
of these official members of the companies, or in 
their name, for the public purpose in hand. These 
last words admit of more than one interpretation, 
but as in the same passage Polybius tells us that all 
who had any money put it into these concerns, we 
may reasonably suppose that he means to indicate 
the participes, or small holders of shares, which were 
called partes, or if very small, particulae.'^ The 
socii and participes seem to be distinguished by 
Cicero in his Verrine orations (ii. 1. 55), where he 
quotes an addition made by Verres illegally as 
praetor to a lex censoria : " qui de censoribus red- 
emerit, eum socium ne admittito neve partem dato." 
If this be so, we may regard the socius as having a 
share both in the management and the liability, 
while the particeps merely put his money into the 
undertaking.^ The actual management, on which 
Polybius is silent, was in Eome in the hands of a 
magister, changing yearly, like the magistrates of 
the State, and in the provinces of a pro -magister 
answering to the pro -magistrate, with a large staff 
of assistants.^ Communications between the manage- 

^ e.g. Livy xxii. 60 praedibus et praediis cavere populo. 

2 Cicero, in his defence of Rabirius Postumus, 2. 4, says that Rabirius' 
father ra&gnas partes habuit publicorum. One Aufidius (Val. Max. vi. 9. 7) 
"Asiatici publici exiguam a.dmodma. particulam habuit." Cp. Cic. in Vat. 
12. 29. 

^ This is the view of Deloume, Les Manieurs d'argent d Eome, 
p. 119 foil. 

* Marq. Staatsverwaltwng, ii. p. 291. 



74 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

ment at home and that in the provinces were kept 
up by messengers [tahellarii), who were chiefly 
slaves ; and it is interesting incidentally to notice 
that these, who are constantly mentioned in Cicero's 
letters, also acted as letter-carriers for private persons 
to whom their employers were known. 

Such a business as this, involving the interests of 
so many citizens, must have necessitated something 
very like the Stock Exchange or Bourse of modern 
times ; and in fact the basilicas and porticoes which 
we met with in the Forum during our walk through 
Rome did actually serve this purpose/ The reader 
of Cicero's letters will have noticed how often the 
Forum is spoken of as the centre of life at Rome — 
going down to the Forum was indeed the equivalent 
of " going into the City," as well as of " going down 
to Westminster." All who had investments in the 
societates would wish to know the latest news 
brought by tahellarii from the provinces, e.g. of the 
state of the crop in Sicily or Asia, or of the disposition 
of some provincial governor towards the publicani 
of his province, or again of the approach of some 
enemy, such as Mithridates or Ariovistus, who by 
defeating a Roman army might break into Roman 
territory and destroy the prospects of a successful 
contractual enterprise. Assuredly Cicero's love for 
the Forum was not a political one only ; he loved it 
indeed as the scene of his great triumphs as an 
advocate, but also no doubt because he was concerned 

^ Deloume, Manieurs d'argcnt, p. 817 foil. 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 75 

in some of the companies which had their head- 
quarters there. When urging the people to give 
Pompeius extraordinary powers to drive Mithridates 
out of reach of Roman Asia, where he had done 
incalculable damage, he dwells both with knowledge 
and feeling on the value of the province, not only to 
the State, but to innumerable private citizens who 
had their money invested in its revenues,^ " If 
some," he pleads, " lose their whole fortunes, they will 
drag many more down with them. Save the State 
from such a calamity : and believe me (though you 
see it well enough) that the whole system of credit 
and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the 
Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues 
of the Asiatic province. If those revenues are 
destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down 
with a crash. See that you do not hesitate for a 
moment to prosecute with all your energies a war 
by which the glory of the Roman name, the safety 
of our allies, our most valuable revenues, and the 
fortunes of innumerable citizens, will be efiectually 
preserved."^ 

This is a good example of the way in which 
political questions might be decided in the interests 
of capital, and it is all the more striking, because 
a few years earlier Sulla had done all he could to 
weaken the capitalists as a distinct class. Pompeius 
went out with abnormal powers, and might be con- 
sidered for the time as their representative ; the 

^ pro lege Manilia, 7. 18. ^ lb. 7. 19. 



76 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

result in this case was on the whole good, for the 
work he did in the East was of permanent value to 
the Empire. But the constitution was shaken and 
never wholly recovered, and nothing that he was 
able to do could restore the unfortunate province of 
Asia to its former prosperity. Four years later the 
company which had contracted for raising the taxes in 
the province sought to repudiate their bargain. This 
was disgraceful, as Cicero himself expressly says ; ^ 
but it is quite possible that they had great difficulty 
in getting the money in, and feared a dead loss,^ 
owing to the impoverishment of the provincials. 
This matter again led to a political crisis ; for the 
senate, urged by Cato, was disposed to refuse the 
concession, and the alliance between the senatorial 
class and the business men (ordinum concordiajj 
which it had been Cicero's particular policy to con- 
firm, in order to mass together all men of property 
against the dangers of socialism and anarchy, was 
thereby threatened so seriously that it ceased to be 
a factor in politics. 

These companies and their agents were indeed 
destined to be a thorn in Cicero's side as a provincial 
governor himself. When called upon to rule Cilicia 
in 51 B.C. he found the people quite unable to pay 
their taxes and driven into the hands of the middle- 

^ ad Att. i. 17. 9. Crassus, no doubt a large shareholder, urged them on. 

^ In a letter to his brother, then governor of this province, Cicero con- 
templates the possibility of contracts being taken at a loss {ad Q. F. i. 1. 33), 
" publicis male redemptis," And in a letter of introduction in 46, he alludes 
to heavy losses sufifered in this way, ad Fam. xiii. 10. 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS ^^ 

man in order to do so ; ^ his sympathies were thus 
divided between the unfortunate provincials, for whom 
he felt a genuine pity, and the interests of the com- 
pany for collecting the Cilician taxes, and of those 
who had invested their money in its funds. In his 
edict, issued before his entrance into the province, he 
had tried to balance the conflicting interests ; writing 
of it to Atticus, who had naturally as a capitalist been 
anxious to know what he was doing, he says that he 
is doing all he can for the publicani, coaxing them, 
praising them, yielding to them — but taking care 
that they do no mischief;^ words which perhaps 
did not altogether satisfy his friend. All honest 
provincial governors, especially in the Eastern 
provinces, which had been the scene of continual 
wars for nearly three centuries, found themselves in 
the same difficulty. They were continually beset by 
urgent appeals on behalf of the tax-companies and 
their agents — appeals made without a thought of the 
condition of a province or its tax -paying capacity — 
so completely had the idea of making money taken 
possession of the Roman mind. Among the letters 
of Cicero are many such appeals, sent by himself 
to other provincial governors, some of them while 
he was himself in Cilicia. We may take two as 
examples, before bringing this part of our subject to 
a close. 

The first of these letters is to P. Silius Nerva, 
propraetor of Bithynia, a province recently added to 

1 ad Att. V. 16. 2. ^ lb. vi. 1. 16. 



78 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the Empire by Pompeius. Cicero here says that he 
is himself closely connected with the partners in the 
company for collecting the pasture-dues (scriptura) 
of the province, " not only because that company as 
a body is my client, but also because I am very 
intimate with most of the individual partners." 
Can we doubt that he was himself a shareholder ? 
He urges Nerva to do all he can for Terentius Hispo, 
the pro-magister of the company, and to try to secure 
for him the means of making all the necessary 
arrangements with the taxed communities — relying, 
we are glad to find, on the tact and kindness of the 
governor.^ The second letter, to his own son-in- 
law, Furius Crassipes, quaestor of Bithynia, shall 
be quoted here in full from Mr. Shuckburgh's trans- 
lation : ^ 

" Though in a personal interview I recommended 
^s earnestly as I could the publicani of Bithynia, and 
though I gathered that by your own inclination no 
less than from my recommendation, you were anxious 
to promote the advantage of that company in every 
way in your power, I have not hesitated to write 
you this, since those interested thought it of great 
importance that I should inform you what my feel- 
ing towards them was. I wish you to believe that, 
while I have ever had the greatest pleasure in doing 
all I can for the order of publicani generally, yet 
this particular company of Bithynia has my special 

^ ad Familiares, xiii. 65. 
' Ih. xiii. 9. I have not adhered quite closely to his translation. 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 79 

good wishes. Owing to the rank and birth of its 
members, this company constitutes a very important 
part of the state : for it is made up of members of 
the other companies : and it so happens that a very 
large number of its members are extremely intimate 
with me, and especially the man who is at present 
at the head of the business, P. Eupilius, its pro- 
magister. Such being the case, I beg you with more 
than common earnestness to protect Cn. Pupius, an 
employe of the company,^ by every sort of kindness 
and liberality in your power, and to secure, as you 
easily may, that his services shall be as satisfactory 
as possible to the company, while at the same time 
securing and promoting the property and interests of 
the partners — as to which I am well aware how much 
power a quaestor possesses. You will be doing me in 
this matter a very great favour, and I can myself 
from personal experience pledge you my word that 
you will find the partners of the Bithynia company 
gratefully mindful of any services you can do them." 
If Cicero, the most tender-hearted of Koman 
public men, could urge the claims of the companies 
so strongly, and, as in this last letter, without 
any allusion to the interests of the province and 
its people, we may well imagine how others, less 
scrupulous, must have combined with the capitalists 
to work havoc in regions that only needed peace and 
mild government to recover from centuries of misery. 

^ " Qui est in operis ejus societatis," i.e. engaged as a subordinate agent. 
— Marquardt, Staatsverwaltung, ii. p. 291. 



8o SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Such a letter is the best comment we can have on 
the pernicious system of raising taxes by contract, 
— a system which was to be modified, regulated, and 
eventually reduced to harmless dimensions under the 
benevolent and scientific government of the early 
Empire. 

We must now turn to the other department of the 
activity of the men of business, that of banking and 
money-lending (negotiatores). 

On the north or sunny side of the Forum we 
noticed in our walk round the city the shops of the 
bankers {tahernae argentariae). The argentarii 
were originally, as their name suggests, only money- 
changers, a class of small business men that arose in 
response to a need felt as soon as increasing commerce 
and extended empire brought foreign coin in large 
quantities to Rome. The Italian communities outside 
the Roman State issued their own coinage until they 
were admitted to the civitas after the Social War, — a 
fact which alone is sufficient to show the need of men 
who made it their business to know the current value 
of various coins in Roman money ; and as Rome 
became involved in the afi'airs of the East, there were 
always circulating in the city the tetradrachms of 
Antioch and Alexandria, the Rhodian drachmas, and 
the cistophori of the kings of Pergamus, afterwards 
coined in the province of Asia.^ No , doubt the 
money-changing business was a profitable one, and 
itself led to the formation of capital which could be 

^ Marq. ii. p. 35 foil. 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 8i 

used in taking deposits and making advances ; and, 
as Professor Purser puts it/ the mere possession 
of a quantity of coin for purposes of change would 
be likely to develop spontaneously the profession of 
banking. In the same way the nummularii, or 
assayers of the coin, having a mass of it in their 
hands, would tend to develop a private business as 
well as their official public one. All these, argentarii 
or nummularii, might be called foeneratores, from the 
interest (Jbenus) which they charged in their trans- 
actions. The profession was a respectable one, for 
honesty and exactness in accounts were absolutely 
necessary to success in it.^ If the reader will turn 
to Cicero's speech in defence of Caecina (6. 16), 
he will find these accounts appealed to, though 
apparently not actually produced in court ; but in 
the Nodes Atticae of Aulus Gellius (xiv. 2) a 
judge who is describing a civil case which came 
before him, mentions, among the documents pro- 
duced, mensae rationes, i.e. the accounts kept by 
the banker. 

Your argentarius seems to have been ready to 
undertake for you almost all that a modern banker 
will do for his customer. He would take deposits of 
money, either for the depositor's use or to bear 
interest, and would make payments on his behalf on 

^ See his article in Diet, of Antiq. ed. 2, s.v. argentarii. 

^ Augustus' grandfather was an argentarius (Suet. Aug. 2), yet his son 
could marry a Julia, and be elected to the consulship, which, however, he 
was prevented by death from filling. 

G 



82 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

receipt of a written order, answering to our cheque ; ^ 
this was a practice probably introduced from Greece, 
for in the Eastern Mediterranean the whole business 
of credit and exchange had long been reduced to a 
system. Again, if you wished to be supplied with 
money during a journey, or to pay a sum to any one 
at a distance, e.g. in Greece or Asia, your argentarius 
would arrange it for you by giving you letters of 
credit or bills of exchange on a banker at such towns 
as you might mention, and so save you the trouble of 
carrying a heavy weight of coin with you. When 
Cicero sent his son to the University of Athens, 
he wished to give him a generous allowance, — too 
generous, as we should think, for it amounted to 
about £640 a year, — and he asked Atticus whether 
it could be managed for him by permutatio, i.e. 
exchange, and received an affirmative answer.^ So 
too when his beloved freedman secretary Tiro fell ill 
of fever at Patrae, Cicero finds it easy to get a local 
banker there to advance him all the money he needed, 
and to pay the doctor, engaging himself to repay the 
money to any agent whom the banker might name.^ 

Your argentarius would also attend for you, or 
appoint an agent to attend, at any public auction in 
which you were interested as seller or purchaser, and 
would pay or receive the money for you, — a practice 
which must have greatly helped him in getting to 

^ The word for this cheque is perscriptio. Cp. Cic. ad Att. ix. 12. 3 viri 
boni usuras perscribunt, i.e. draw the interest on their deposits. 

2 Cic. ad Att. xii. 24 and 27. ^ Cic. ad Fam. xvi. 4 and 9. 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 83 

know the current value of all kinds of property, and 
indeed in learning to understand human nature on its 
business side. In the passage from the ^ro Caecina 
quoted just now, a lady, Caesennia, wished to buy an 
estate ; she employs an agent, Aebutius, no doubt 
recommended by her banker, and to him the estate is 
knocked down. He undertakes that the argentarius 
of the vendor, who is present at the auction, shall 
be paid the value, and this is ultimately done by 
Caesennia, and the sum entered in the banker's books 
(tabulae). 

But perhaps the most important part of the 
business was the finding money for those who were 
in want of it, i.e. making advances on interest. The 
poor man who was in need of ready money could get 
it from the argentarius in coin if he had any security 
to offer, and, as we saw in the last chapter, might 
get entangled more and more hopelessly in the nets 
of the money-lender. Whether the same argentarius 
did this small business and also the work of supplying 
the rich man with credit, we do not know ; it may 
have been the case that the great money-lenders like 
Atticus themselves employed argentarii, and so kept 
them going. That Atticus would undertake, anyhow, 
for a friend like Cicero, any amount of money -finding, 
we know well from many letters of Cicero, written 
when he was anxious to buy a piece of land at any 
cost on which to erect a shrine to his beloved 
daughter ; ^ and we may be pretty sure that Atticus 

1 Cic. ad Att. xiii. contains many letters of interest in this connexion. 



84 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

could not have done all that Cicero importunately- 
pressed upon him if he had not had a number of useful 
professional agents at command. From these same 
letters we also learn that finding money by no means 
necessarily meant finding coin ; in a society where 
every one was lending or borrowing, and probably 
doing both at the same time, what actually passed 
was chiefly securities, mortgages, debts, and so on. 
If you wanted to hand over a hundred thousand or so 
to a creditor, what your agent had as often as not to do 
was to persuade that creditor to accept as payment 
the debts owing to yourself from others, i.e. you would 
hand over to him, if he would accept them, the bonds 
or other securities given you by your own debtors.^ 

It is plain then that the money-lenders had an 
enormous business, even in Rome alone, and risky as 
it undoubtedly was, it must often have been a profit- 
able one. And it was not only at Rome that men 
were borrowing and lending, but over the whole 
Empire. For reasons which it would need an 
economic treatise to explain, private men, cities, 
and even kings were in want of money ; it was 
needed to meet the increased cost of living and the 
constantly increasing standard of living among the 
educated ; ^ it was needed by the cities of Greece and 

^ Cic. ad Att. xiii. 2. 3. Cp. xii. 25. In xii. 12 Cicero's divorced wife 
Terentia wishes to pay a debt by transferring to her creditor a debt of 
Cicero's to herself. Another way in which actual payment could be avoided 
was by paying interest on purchase - money instead of the lump sum. 
Cp. xii. 22. 

^ A good example of this in Velleius ii. 10 (house-rent). 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 85 

tlie East to repair the damages done in the wars of 
the last three hundred years ; it was needed by the 
poorer provincials to pay the taxes for which neither 
the publicani nor the Roman government could 
afford to wait ; and it was needed by the kings who 
had come within the dismal shadow of the Roman 
Empire, in order to carry on their own government, 
or to satisfy the demands of the neighbouring 
provincial governor, or to bribe the ruling men at 
Rome to get some decree passed in their favour. 
Cicero, at the end of his life, looking back to his own 
consulship in 63, says that at no time in his recol- 
lection was the whole world in such a condition of 
indebtedness,^ and in a famous passage in his second 
Catilinarian oration he has drawn a picture of the 
various classes of debtors in Rome and Italy at that 
time [Cat. ii. § 18 foil.). He tells us of those who 
have wealth and yet will not pay their debts ; of 
those who are in debt and look to a revolution to 
absolve them ; of the veterans of the Sullan army, 
settled in colonies such as Faesulae, who had rushed 
into debt in order to live luxurious lives ; of old 
debtors of the city, getting deeper and deeper into 
the quagmire, who joined the conspiracy as a last 
desperate venture. There was in fact in that famous 
year a real social fermentation going on, caused by 
economic disturbance of the most serious kind ; the 
germs of the disease can be traced back to the 
Hannibalic war and its effects on Italy, but all the 

1 Cic. de Officiis, ii. 24, 84. 



86 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

symptoms had been continually exacerbated by the 
negligence and ignorance of the government, and 
brought to a head by the Social and Civil Wars in 
90-82 B.C. In 63 the State escaped an economic 
catastrophe through the vigilance of Cicero and the 
alliance of the respectable classes under his leader- 
ship. In 49, and again in 48, it escaped a similar 
disaster through the good sense of Caesar and his 
agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and 
Charybdis by saving the debtors without ruining the 
lenders.^ 

Wonderful figures are given by later writers, such 
as Plutarch, of the debts and loans of the great men 
of this time, and they may stand as giving us a 
general impression of private financial recklessness. 
But the only authentic information that has come 
down to us is what Cicero drops from time to time 
in his correspondence about his own affairs,^ and even 
this needs much explanation which we are unable to 
apply to it. What is certain is that Cicero never 
had more than a very moderate income on which he 
could depend, and that at times he was hard up for 
money, especially of course after his exile and the 
confiscation of his property ; and that on the other 
hand he never had any difficulty in getting the sums 
he needed, and never shows the smallest real anxiety 
about his finances. His profession as a barrister 

^ Caesar, de, Bell. Oiv. iii, 1 and 20 foil. 

^ Deloume in his Manieurs d' argent has a chapter on this (p. 58 foil.), 
but his details are not wholly to be relied on. Boissier's sketch in Cic4ron 
et ses amis, 83 foil., is quite accurate. 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 87 

only brought him a return indirectly in the form of 
an occasional legacy or gift, since fees were forbidden 
by a lex Cincia; his books could hardly have paid 
him, at least in the form of money ; his inherited 
property was small, and his Italian villas were not 
profitable farms, nor was it the practice to let such 
country houses, as we do now, when not occupying 
them ; he declined a provincial government, the 
usual source of wealth, and when at last compelled 
to undertake one, only realised what was then a 
paltry sum, — some £17,500, all of which, while in 
deposit at Ephesus, was seized by the Pompeians in 
the Civil War.^ Yet even early in life he could afford 
the necessary expenses for election to successive 
magistracies, and could live in the style demanded 
of an important public man. Immediately after his 
consulship he paid £28,000 for Crassus' house on the 
Ealatine, and it is here that we first discover how he 
managed such financial operations. Here are his own 
words in a letter to a friend of December 62 B.C. i^ 
*'I have bought the house for 3,500 sestertia ... so 
you may now look on me as so deeply in debt as to 
be eager to join a conspiracy if any one would admit 
me I . . . Money is plentiful at 6 per cent, and the 
success of my measures (in the consulship) has caused 
me to be regarded as a good security." 

The simple fact was that Cicero was always 
regarded as a safe man to lend money to, by the 
business men and the great capitalists ; partly 

1 ad Fain. v. 20 fin. 2 75, y_ 9, 



88 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

because he was an honest man, — a vir bonus who 
would never dream of repudiation or bankruptcy ; 
partly because he knew every one, and had a hundred 
wealthy friends besides the lender of the moment, 
and among them, most faithful of all, the prudent 
and indefatigable Atticus. Undoubtedly then it was 
by borrowing, and regularly paying interest on the 
loans, that he raised money whenever he wanted it. 
He may have occasionally made money in the 
companies of tax-collectors ; we have seen that he 
probably had shares in some of their ventures. But 
there is no clear evidence in his letters of this source 
of wealth,^ and there is abundant evidence of the 
borrowing. After his return from exile, though the 
senate had given him somewhat meagre compensa- 
tion for the loss of his property, he began at once 
to borrow and to build : "I am building in three 
places," he writes to his brother,^ " and am patching 
up my other houses. I live somewhat more lavishly 
than I used to do ; I am obliged to do so." Here 
again we know from whom he borrowed, — it was this 
same brother, who of course had no more certain 
income than his own, probably less. But he had 
been governor of Asia for three years (61-58 B.C.), and 
must have realised large sums even in that exhausted 
province; and at this moment he was legatus to 
Pompeius as special commissioner for organising the 

^ Deloume's attempt to prove that Cicero speculated with enonuous 
profits seems to me to miss the mark. 

2 ad Q. Fratr. ii. 4. 3. Cp. ad Att. iv. 2. 



i 



Ill THE MEN OF BUSINESS 89 

supply of corn, and thus was in immediate contact 
witli one of the greatest millionaires of the day. In 
order to repay his brother all Marcus had to do was 
to borrow from other friends. " In regard to money 
I am crippled. But the liberality of my brother I 
have repaid, in spite of his protests, by the aid of 
my friends, that I might not be drained quite dry 
myself" (ad Att. iv. 3). Two years later an unwary 
reader might feel some astonishment at finding that 
Quintus himself was now deep in debt ; ^ but as he 
continues to read the correspondence his astonish- 
ment will vanish. With the prospect before him of 
a prolonged stay in Gaul with Caesar, Quintus might 
doubtless have borrowed to any extent ; and in fact 
with Caesar's help — ^the proceeds of the Gallic wars — 
both brothers found themselves in opulence. The 
Civil War, and the repayment of his debts to Caesar, 
nearly ruined Marcus towards the end of his life, 
but nothing prevented his contriving to find money 
for any object on which he had set his heart ; 
when in his grief for the loss of his daughter he 
wishes to buy suburban gardens where a shrine to her 
memory may (strange to say) attract public notice, 
he tells Atticus to buy what is necessary at any 
cost. " Manage the business your own way ; do 
not consider what my purse demands — about that 
I care nothing — but what I want." ^ 

"^ adQ. Fratr. ii. 14. 3. 

2 ad Att. xii. 22. I may add in a footnote a final startling example of 
the recklessness we have been noting. Decimus Brutus had, in March 



90 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Such being tlie financial method of Cicero and 
his brother, we cannot be surprised to find that the 
younger generation of the family followed faithfully 
in the footsteps of their elders. We have seen that 
the young Marcus had a large allowance at Athens, 
and on the whole he seems to have kept fairly well 
within it, in spite of some trouble ; but his cousin 
the younger Quintus, coming to see his uncle in 
December 45, showed him a gloomy countenance, 
and on being asked the meaning of it, said that he 
was going with Caesar to the Parthian war in order 
to avoid his creditors, and presumably to make 
money to pay them with.^ He had not even enough 
money for the journey out. His uncle did not ofi'er 
to give him any, but he does not seem to have thought 
very seriously of the young man's embarrassments. 

One more example of the financial dealings of the 
business men of this extraordinary age, and we will 
bring this chapter to an end. It is a story which 
has luckily been preserved in Cicero's speech in 
defence of a certain Eabirius Postumus in the 
year 54, who was accused under Caesar's law de 
pecuniis repetundis (extortion in the provinces). It 
is a remarkable revelation of all the most striking 
methods of making and using money in the last years 
of the Republic. 

44 B.C., a capital of £320,000, yet next year he writes to Cicero that so 
far from any part of his private property being unencumbered, he had 
encumbered all his friends with debt also {ad Fani. xi. 10. 5). But this was 
in order to maintain troops. 
^ ad Att. xiii. 42. Cp. xvi. 5. 



in THE MEN OF BUSINESS 91 

The father of this Rabirius, says Cicero, had been 
a distinguished member of the equestrian order, and 
" fortissimus et maximus publicanus " ; not greedy of 
money, but most liberal to his friends — in other 
words, he was not a miser, for that character was 
rare in this age, but lent his money freely in order 
to acquire influence and consideration. The son 
took up the same line of business, and engaged in 
a wide sphere of financial operations. He dealt 
largely in the stock of the tax - companies ; he 
lent money to cities in several provinces ; he lent 
money to Ptolemy Auletes, King of Egypt, both 
before he was expelled from his kingdom by sedition, 
and afterwards when he was in Rome in 59 and 
58, intriguing to induce the senate to have him 
restored. Rabirius never doubted that he would 
be so restored, and seems to have failed to see 
the probability of such a policy being contested or 
quarrelled about, as actually happened in the 
winter of 57-56. He lent, and persuaded his friends 
to lend : ^ he represented the king's cause as a good 
investment ; and then, like the investing agent 
of to-day who slips so easily from carelessness 
into crime, he had to go on lending more and more, 
because he feared that if he stopped the king might 
turn against him. 

He had staked the mass of his substance on a 
desperate venture. But time went on and Ptolemy 

1 What the king really wanted the money for, was to bribe the senate to 
restore him. — Cic. ad Fam. i. 1. 



92 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

was not restored, and without the revenues of his 
kingdom he of course could not pay his creditors. 
At last, at the end of the year 56, Gabinius, then 
governor of Syria, had pressure put on him by the 
creditors — among them perhaps both Caesar and Pom- 
peius — to march into Egypt without the authority 
of the senate. He took Eabirius with him, and, in 
order to secure the re-payment, the latter was made 
superintendent {BiotKr)T7]<;) of the Egyptian revenues.^ 
Unluckily for him, his wily debtor did after all turn 
against him, and he escaped from Egypt with 
difficulty and with the loss of all his wealth. When 
Gabinius was accused de repetundis and found guilty 
of accepting enormous sums from Ptolemy, Eabirius 
was involved in the same prosecution as having 
received part of the money ; Cicero defended him, 
and as it seems with success, on the plea that equites 
were not liable to prosecution under the lex Julia. 
Towards the end of his speech he drew a clever 
picture of his unlucky client's misfortunes, and de- 
clared that he would have had to quit the Forum, i.e. 
to leave the Stock Exchange in disgrace, if Caesar 
had not come to his rescue by placing large sums at 
his disposal. 

What Eabirius did was simply to gamble on a 
gigantic scale, and get others to gamble with him. 
The luck turned against him, and he came utterly 
to grief There seems indeed to have been a 
perfect passion for dealing with money in this wild 

1 Cic. pro Rob. Post. 8. 22. 



in THE MEN OF BUSINESS 93 

way among the men of wealth and influence ; it 
was the fancy of the hour, and no disgrace attached 
to it if a man could escape ruin. Thus the vast 
capital accumulated — the sources of which were 
almost entirely in the provinces and the king- 
doms on the frontiers — was hardly ever used 
productively. It never returned to the region 
whence it came, to "be used in developing its 
resources ; the idea of using it even in Italy for 
industrial undertakings was absent from the mind 
of the gambler. Those numberless villas, of which 
we shall speak in another chapter, were homes 
of luxury and magnificence, not centres of agri- 
cultural industry. There are indeed some signs 
that in this very generation the revival of Italian 
agriculture was beginning, and more especially the 
cultivation of the olive and the vine ; Varro, some 
twenty years later, could claim that Italy was the 
best cultivated country in the world. ^ It may be 
that the din of the " insanum forum " and its 
wild speculation has prevented our hearing of the 
quiet efforts in the country to put capital to a 
legitimate productive use. But of the social life of 
the city the Forum was the heart, and of any prudent 

^ Varro, B. R. i. 2. Ferrero {Greatness and Decline of Borne) has the 
merit of having discerned the signs of the regeneration of Italian agri- 
culture at this time, but he is apt to push his conclusions further than 
the evidence warrants. See the translation of his work by A. E. Zimmern, 
i. p. 124 ; ii. p. 131 foil. The statement of Pliny quoted by him (xv. 1. 3) 
that oil was first exported from Italy in the year 52 B.C., is, however, of 
the utmost importance. 



94 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

or scientific use of capital the Forum knew hardly 

anything. 

Of the two classes of business men we have been 
describing, the tax-farmers and the money-lenders, it 
is hard to say which wrought the most mischief in 
the Empire ; they played into each other's hands in 
wringing money out of the helpless provincials. 
Together too they did incalculable harm, morally and 
socially, among the upper strata of Eoman society at 
home. Economic maladies react upon the mental 
and moral condition of a State. Where the idea of 
making money for its own sake, or merely for the 
sake of the pleasure derivable from excitement, is 
paramount in the minds of so large a section of 
society, moral perception quickly becomes warped. 
The sense of justice disappears, because when the 
fever is on a man he does not stop to ask whether 
his gains are ill-gotten ; and in this age the only 
restriction on the plundering of the subjects of the 
Empire was a legal one, and that of no great efl&cacy. 
There are many repulsive things in the exquisite 
poetry of Catullus, but none of them jar on the 
modern mind quite so sharply as his virulent attacks 
on a provincial governor in whose suite he had gone 
to Bithynia in the hope of enriching himself, and 
under whose just administration he had failed to do 
so. There is lost also the sense of a duty arising out of 
the possession of wealth — the feeling that it should do 
some good in the world, or at least be in part applied 
to some useful purpose. Lastly, the exciting pursuit 



m THE MEN OF BUSINESS 95 

of wealth helps to produce a curious restlessness 
and instability of character, of which we have many 
examples in the age we are studying. " Unstable as 
water, thou shalt not excel," are words that might 
be applied to many a young man among Cicero's 
acquaintance, and to many women also. 

No sudden operation could cure these evils — they 
needed the careful and gradual treatment of a wise 
physician. As in so many other ways, so here 
Augustus showed his wonderful instinct as a social 
reformer. The first requisite of all was an age of 
comparative peace — a healthy atmosphere in which 
the patient could recover his natural tone. Next in 
importance was the removal of the incitement to 
enrich yourself and to spend illegally or unprofitably, 
and the revival of a sense of duty towards the State 
and its rulers. Provincial governors were made more 
really responsible, and a scientific census revealed the 
actual tax -paying capacity of the provincials; tax- 
farming was more closely superintended and gradually 
disappeared. It is true enough that even under the 
Empire great fortunes were made and lost, but the 
gambling spirit, the wild recklessness in monetary 
dealings, are not met with again. The Eoman Forum 
ceased to be insane, and Italy became once more the 
home of much happy and useful country life. The 
passionate and reckless self-consciousness of Catullus 
is succeeded in the next generation by the calm 
sweet hopefulness of Virgil ; in passing from the one 
poet to the other, we feel that we are leaving behind 



96 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap, m 

us an age of over-sensitive self-seeking and entering 
on one in which duty and honour, labour on the 
land and hard work for the State, may be reckoned as 
things more likely to make life worth living than all 
the accumulated capital of a Crassus. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 

Above the men of business of equestrian rank, in 

social standing though not necessarily in wealth, 

there was in Cicero's time an aristocracy which a 

Roman of that day would perhaps have found it a 

little difficult to explain or define to a foreigner. 

Fortunately all foreigners coming to Rome would 

know what was meant by the senate, the great 

council which received envoys from all nations outside 

the Empire ; and the stranger might be told in the 

first place that all members of that august assembly, 

with their families, were considered as elevated above 

the equestrian order, and as forming the main body 

of the aristocracy proper. But if the informant were 

by chance a conservative Roman of old family, he 

might proceed to qualify this definition. "There 

are now in the senate," he might say, "plenty of 

men who are only there because they have held the 

quaestorship, which Sulla made the qualification for 

a seat, and there are many equites whom Sulla made 

into senators by the form of a vote of the people ; 

such men, even the great orator Cicero himself, I do 

97 H 



98 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

not reckon as really members of the nobility, because 
they do not belong to old families who have done the 
State good service in past time. They have no images 
of their ancestors in their houses ; they come from 
municipal towns, or spring from some low family in 
the city ; they may have raised themselves by their 
talents, perhaps only by their money, but they have 
no guarantee of antiquity, their names are not in our 
annals. All we true conservative Eomans (and a 
Eoman is hardly a Roman if not conservative) pro- 
foundly believe that a man whose family has once 
attained to high public honour and done good public 
service, will he a safer person to elect as a magistrate 
than one whose family is unknown and untried — a 
belief which is surely based on a truth of human 
nature. I should count a man who happens not to be 
in the senate himself, for want of wealth or inclina- 
tion, but whose family has its images and its traditions 
of great ancestors, as far more truly an "optimate" than 
most of these new men. . Fortunately our most famous 
families, whose names are known all over the Empire, 
are still to be found in the senate, and indeed form a 
powerful body there, capable of resisting to the last 
the revolutionary dangers that threaten us. The 
people still elect to magistracies the Aemilii, Lutatii, 
Claudii, Cornelii, Julii, and many more families that 
have been famous in our history, and will, I trust, con- 
tinue to elect them so long as our Eepublic lasts." ^ 

* The Republic was not to last long ; but among the consuls of the last 
years of its existence were several members of the old families. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 99 

There was indeed a glamour about these splendid 
names, as there is about the titles of our ancient 
noble famihes ; their holders may almost be said to have 
claimed high office as a right, like the Whig families 
of the Revolution for a century after their triumph. 
Though we may use the word in a wider sense in 
this chapter, these grand old families were the true 
aristocracy, and inspired just that respect in the 
minds of men outside their circle which is still so 
familiar to us in England. Cicero was to such men 
an " outsider," a novus homo ; and the close reader of 
Cicero's letters, if he is looking out (as he should be) 
for Cicero's constantly changing attitude of mind 
as he addresses himself to various correspondents, 
cannot fail to see how comparatively awkward and 
stilted he often is when writing to one of these great 
nobles, with whom he has never been really intimate ; 
and how easily his pen glides along when he is letting 
himself talk to Atticus, or Foetus, or M. Marius, men 
who were outside the pale of nobility. It is true 
that he is sometimes embarrassed in other ways when 
writing to great personages, as, for example, Lentulus 
Spinther, consul in 57, or to Appius Claudius, consul 
in 53 ; but had they been men of his own kind he 
never would have felt that embarrassment in the 
same degree. When writing to such men he rarely 
or never indulges in those little sportive jokes or 
allusions which enliven his more intimate correspond- 
ence, nor does he tell the truth so strictly, for they 
might not always care to hear it. 



lOO SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Here is a specimen which will give some idea of 
his manner in writing to an aristocrat : he is con- 
gratulating L. Aemilius PauUus, who secured his 
election to the consulship in the summer of 51 B.C. : 

" Though I never doubted that the Roman people, 
considering your eminent services to the Republic 
and the splendid position of your family, would 
enthusiastically elect you consul by a unanimous 
vote, yet I felt extreme delight when the news 
reached me ; and I pray the gods to render your 
official career fortunate, and to make the administra- 
tion of your office worthy of your own position and 
that of your ancestors. . . . And would that it had 
been in my power to have been at home to see that 
wished-for day, and to have given you the support 
which your noble services and kindness to me 
deserved ! But since the unexpected and unlooked- 
for accident of my having to take a province has 
deprived me of that opportunity, yet, that I may be 
enabled to see you as consul actually administering 
the state in a manner worthy of your position, I 
earnestly beg you to take care to prevent my being 
treated unfairly, or having additional time added 
to my year of office. If you do that, you will 

abundantly crown your former acts of kindness to 

" 1 
me. 

This Aemilius PauUus, like Spinther and many 

^ ad Fam. xv. 12. This rather stilted letter is nearly identical with one to 
the other consul-designate, another aristocrat, Claudius Marcellus. Cicero 
is in each case trying to do his own business, while writing to a man of 
higher social rank than his own. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY loi 

others, belonged to a respectable but somewbat 
characterless type of aristocrat ; these formed a con- 
siderable and a powerful section of the senate, where 
they were an obstacle to reform and administrative 
efficiency. They were really a survival from the old 
type of Roman noble, which had done excellent work 
in its day ; men in whom the individual had been 
kept in strict subordination to the State, and whose 
personal idiosyncrasies and ambitions only excited 
suspicion. But towards the end of the Republican 
period the individual had free play ; at no time in 
ancient history do we meet with so many various and 
interesting kinds of individuality, even among the 
nobilitas itself This is not merely the result of the 
abundant literature in which their traits have come 
down to us ; it was a fact of the age, in which the 
idea of the State had fallen into the background, and 
the individual found no restraint on his thoughts 
and little on his actions, no hindrance to the develop- 
ment of his capacity either for good or evil. Sulla, 
Catiline, Pompeius, Cato, Clodius, Caesar, all have 
their marked characteristics, familiar to all who read 
the history of the Roman revolution. Caesar is the 
most remarkable example of strong character among 
the men of high aristocratic descent, and it is 
interesting to notice how entirely he was without 
the exclusive tendency which we associate with 
aristocrats. He was intimate with men of all ranks ; 
his closest friends seem to have been men who were 
not noble. While the high aristocrats looked down 



102 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

as a rule on Cicero the novus homo, and for some 
years positively hated him/ Caesar, though differ- 
ing from him toto coelo in politics, was always on 
pleasant terms of personal intercourse with him ; he 
had a charm of manner, a literary taste, and a genuine 
admiration for genius, which was invariably irre- 
sistible to the sensitive " novus homo." With Pom- 
pey, though he trusted him politically as he never 
trusted Caesar, Cicero was never so intimate. They 
had not the same common interests; Cicero could 
laugh at Pompey behind his back, but hardly once in 
his correspondence does he attempt to raise a jest 
about Caesar. 

Thus in the governing or senatorial aristocracy 
we find men of a great variety of character, from 
the old-fashioned nobilis, exclusive in society and 
obstructive in politics, to the man of individual 
genius and literary ability, whether of blue blood 
like Caesar, or like Cicero the scion of a municipal 
family which has never gained or sought political 
distinction. But for the purposes of this chapter we 
may discern and discuss two main types of character 
in this aristocracy : first, that on which the new 
Greek culture had worked to advantage, not destroy- 
ing the best Roman qualities, but drawing them into 

^ The letters of the years 58 to 54 are full of bitter allusions to the 
mvidia of these men, which culminate in the long and windy one to 
Lentulus Spinther of October 54, where he actually accuses them of taking 
up Clodius in order to spite him. In a confidential note to Atticus in the 
spring of 56, he told him that they hated him for buying the Tusculan 
villa of the great noble Catulus. — ad Fain. i. 9 ; ck? Att. iv. 5. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 103 

usefulness in new ways ; secondly, that on which 
the same culture had worked to its harm by taking 
advantage of weak points in the Roman armour, 
sapping the true Roman quality without substituting 
any other excellence. We will briefly trace the 
growth of these two types, and take an example of 
each among Cicero's intimate friends, not from the 
famous personages familiar to every one, but from 
eminent and interesting men of whom the ordinary 
student knows comparatively little. 

Ever since the Hannibalic war, and probably even 
before it, Roman nobles had felt the power of Greek 
culture ; they had begun to think, to learn about 
peoples who were different from themselves in habits 
and manners, and to advance, the best of them at 
least, in wisdom and knowledge ; and this is true 
in spite of the unquestioned fact that it was in this 
same era that the seeds were sown of moral and 
political degeneracy. We shall have abundant oppor- 
tunity of noting the effects of this degeneracy in the 
last age of the Republic, but it is pleasant to dwell 
for a moment on that more wholesome Greek 
influence which enticed the finer minds among the 
Roman nobility into a new region of culture, 
stimulating thought and strengthening the springs 
of conduct. 

Even the old Cato himself, most rigid of Roman 
conservatives, was not unmoved by this influence,^ 
and it was to him that Rome owed the introduction 

^ Plutarch, Cato major 2 and 12. 



I04 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

of Ennius, tlie greatest literary figure of tliat age, 
into Roman society.^ But the first genuine example 
of tlie new culture, of tlie Hellenic enthusiasm of the 
age, is to be found in Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror 
of Macedonia, a true Roman aristocrat who was 
delighted to learn from Greeks. Plutarch's Life of 
this man is a valuable record of the tendencies of 
the time. After his failure to obtain a second 
consulship, Plutarch tells us^ that he retired into 
private life, devoting himself to religious duties and 
to the education of his children, training these in 
the old Roman habits in which he had himself been 
trained, but also in Greek culture, and that with 
even greater enthusiasm. He had about them Greek 
teachers, not only of grammar, rhetoric, and philo- 
sophy, but of the fine arts, and even of out -door 
pursuits, such as hunting (to which the Romans were 
not greatly addicted), and of the care of horses and 
dogs ; and he made a point of being present himself 
at all their exercises, bodily and mental. The result 
of this wholesome Xenophontic education is seen in 
his son, the great Scipio Aemilianus, who was 
adopted into the family of the Scipios in the lifetime 
of his father. Whatever view we may take of this 
great man's conduct in war and politics, there can 
hardly be a doubt that the Romans themselves were 
right in treasuring his memory as one of the best of 

^ Corn. Nepos, Cato 1. 4, who remarks that Cato's return from his 
quaestorship in Sardinia with Ennius in his train was as good as a splendid 
triumph. 

^ Plut. Aem, Paul. 6 ad fin. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 105 

their race. When we put all the facts of his life 
together, from his early youth, of which his friend 
Polybius has left us a most beautiful picture,^ to his 
sudden and probably violent death in the maturity 
of his powers, we are compelled to believe that he 
was really a man of wide sympathies, a strong sense 
of justice which guided him steadily through good 
report and ill, perfect purity of life, and hatred of all 
that was low and bad, whether in rich or poor. He 
was not, like his father, a Roman aristocrat patronis- 
ing Greek culture ; ^ in him we see a perfectly natural 
and mature combination of the noblest qualities of 
the Roman and the wholesomest qualities of the 
Greek. " It was an awakening truth," says a great 
authority, " in the minds of Romans like Scipio, that 
intellectual culture must be built upon a foundation 
of moral rectitude : and such a foundation they could 
find in the storehouse of their own domestic tradi- 
tions." ^ When Cicero, who held him to be the 
greatest of Romans, wrote his dialogue on the State 
{de Republica), with the new idea pervading it of 
the moral and political ascendancy of a single man, 
he made Scipio the hero and the one ascendant 
figure in his work, and ended it with an imitation of 
the Platonic " myth," in the form of a " dream of 
Scipio." 

Scipio gathered round him a circle of able and 

^ Polybius, xxxii. 9-16. 

^ The difference between him and his father, especially in politics, is 
sketched in Plutarch's Life of the latter, eh. xxxviii. 

^ F. Leo, in Bie griechische und lateinische Literatur, p. 337. 



io6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

cultured men, both Roman and Greek, including 
almost every living Roman of ability, and among the 
Greeks the historian Polybius and the philosopher 
Panaetius, of whom we shall have more to learn in 
the course of this volume. Of this circle the best 
and ablest men of Cicero's earlier days were mentally 
the children, and his own views both of literature 
and politics were largely formed upon the Scipionic 
tradition. Indeed to understand the mental and moral 
furniture of the Roman mind in the Ciceronian age, it 
is absolutely necessary to study that of the generation 
which made that mind what it was ; but here space 
can only be found to point out how the enlighten- 
ment of the Scipionic circle opened out new ways in 
manners, in literature, in philosophical receptivity, 
and lastly in the study of the law, which was destined 
to be Rome's greatest contribution to civilisation. 

Manners, the demeanour of the individual in social 
intercourse, are a valuable index, if not an entirely 
conclusive one, of the mental and moral tone of 
society in any age. Ease and courteousness of 
bearing mean, as a rule, that the sense of another's 
claims as a human being are always present to the 
mind. Whatever be the shortcomings of the last 
age of the Republic, we must give due credit to the 
fact that in their outward demeanour towards each 
other the educated men of that age almost invariably 
show good breeding. It is true enough that public 
vituperation, in senate or law-courts, was a fact of 
every day, and the wealth of violent personal abuse 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 107 

whicli a gentleman like Cicero could expend on one 
whom for the time he hated, or who had done him 
some wrong, passes all belief.^ But the history of 
this vituperation is a curious one ; it was a traditional 
method of hostile oratory, and sprang from an old 
Roman root, the tendency to defamation and satire, 
which may itself be attributed in part to the ItaHan 
custom of levelling abuse at a public man (e.g. at his 
triumph) in order to avert evil from him.^ To single 
out a man's personal ugliness, to calumniate his 
ancestry in the vilest terms, — these were little more 
than traditional practices, oratorical devices, which 
the rhetorical education of the day encouraged, and 
which no one took very seriously." But we are 
concerned in this chapter mainly with private life ; 
and there we find almost universal consideration 
and courtesy. In the whole of the Ciceronian corre- 
spondence there is hardly a letter that does not show 
good breeding, and there are many that are the natural 
result of real kindly feeling and true sympathy. 

A good example of the best type of Roman 
manners is to be found in Plutarch's Life of Gains 
Gracchus, the younger contemporary of Scipio, who 
had married his sister. Plutarch draws a picture of 
him so vivid that by common consent it is ascribed to 

^ The best specimens, or rather the worst, are to be found in the speeches 
in Pisonem, in Vatinium, and in the Second Philippic. 

^ The most instructive passage on vituperatio is Cicero's defence of Caelius, 
ch. 3. Cp. Quintilian iii. 7. 1 and 19. On the custom at triumphs, etc., see 
Munro's Elucidations of Catullus, p. 75 foil, for most valuable remarks. 

' We have courteous letters from Cicero both to Piso and Vatinius, only 
a few years after he had depicted them in public as monsters of iniquity. 



io8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the memoirs of some one who knew him. *' In all his 
dealings with men," says the biographer, " he was 
always dignified yet always courteous " ; that is, while 
he inspired respect, men felt also that he would do 
anything in his power for them. That this was said 
of him by a Roman, and not invented for him by 
Plutarch, seems probable because the combination is 
one peculiarly Roman ; so Livy, when he wishes to 
describe the finest type of Roman character, says 
that a certain man was "hand minus libertatis 
alienae quam suae dignitatis memor."^ This same 
combination meets us also in the little pictures of the 
social life of cultivated men which Cicero has left us 
in some of his dialogues. There the speakers are 
usually of the nobility, often distinguished members 
of senatorial families, as in the de Oratore, where the 
chiei personae are Crassus, Antonius, and Scaevola, 
the conservative triumvirate of the day. They all 
seem grave, or but seldom gently jocular, respectful to 
each other, and perhaps a trifle tedious ; they never 
quarrel, however deeply they may difi'er, and we 
may guess that they did not hold their opinions 
strongly enough to urge them to open rupture. We 
seem to see the same grave faces, with rather long 
noses and large mouths, which meet us in the 
sculptures of Augustus' Ara Pacis,^ — full of dignity, 
but a little wanting in animation. 

^ Plut. C. Gracchus, ch. 6 ad Jin. Cp. Livy vii. 33. 
^ These characteristic figures may be most conveniently seen in Mrs. 
Strong's interesting volume on Roman sculpture, p. 42 foil. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 109 

There is one singular exception to the good 
manners of the period ; but as the result rather of 
affectation than of nature, it may help to prove our 
rule. Again and again in Plutarch's Life of Cato 
the younger the mention of his rudeness proves the 
strength of the tradition about him. It was said 
that this lost him the consulship, as he declined to 
make himself agreeable in the style expected from 
candidates.^ Even in a letter to Cicero, an old friend, 
though not actually rude, he is absurdly patronising 
and impertinent to a man many years his senior, and 
writes in very bad taste. Probably the enmity 
between him and Caesar arose or was confirmed in 
this way, as Cato always made a point of being 
rudest to those whom he most disliked. He fancied 
that he was imitating his great ancestor, and assert- 
ing the virtue of good old Roman bluntness against 
modern Greek affectation ; he did not in the least see 
that he was himself a curious example of Roman affec- 
tation, shown up by the real amenities of intercourse, 
for which Romans had largely to thank Greece.^ 

In literature too the average capacity of this 
aristocracy was high, though the greatest literary 
figures of the age, if we except Caesar, do not, strictly 
speaking, belong to it ; Cicero was a novus homo, and 
Lucretius and Catullus were not of the senatorial 

^ Plut. Cato, ch. 1. ad fin. Blanditia was the word for civility in a 
candidate: "opus est magnopere blanditia," says Quintus CicQio, de pet. 
cons. § 41. 

2 There is a pleasanter picture of Cato, sitting in Lucullus' library and 
in his right mind, in Cic. de Finibus iii. 2. 7. 



no SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

order. But the new education, as we shall see later 
on, was admirably calculated to train men in the art 
of speaking and writing, if not in the habit of 
independent thinking; and among the nobles who 
reaped the full fruits of this education every one 
could write in Latin and probably also in Greek, and 
if he aimed at public distinction, could speak with- 
out disgracing himself in the senate and the courts. 
Oratory was, in fact, the staple product of the age, 
and the chief raison d'etre of its literary activity. 
Long ago the practice had begun of writing out 
successful speeches delivered in the senate, in the 
courts, or at funerals ; the means of publication were 
easy, as a consequence of the number of G-reek slaves 
who could act as copyists, and thus oratory formed 
the basis of a prose literature which is essentially 
Roman ,^ rooted in the practical necessities of the life 
of the Roman noble, though deeply tinged with the 
Greek ideas and forms of expression acquired in the 
process of education in vogue. Treatises on rhetoric, 
the art of effective expression in prose, form an 
important part of it ; two of them still survive from 
the time of Sulla, — the Rhetorica ad Herennium 
of an unknown author, and Cicero's early treatise 
de Inventione. Later on Cicero wrote his admir- 
able dialogue de Oratore and other works on the 
same subject, ending with his Brutus, a catalogue 
raisonnee, invaluable to us, of all the great Roman 
orators down to his own time. 

^ See Leo, in work already cited, p. 338 foil. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY iii 

In history writing the standard was not so high. 
The rhetorical education made men good professional 
orators, but indifferent and dilettante historians, and 
the example of more accurate historical investiga- 
tion and reflection set by Polybius was not followed, 
except perhaps by Caelius Antipater in the Gracchan 
age/ History was affected for the worse by the 
rhetorical art, as indeed poetry was destined also to 
be ; Sallust, though we owe much to him, was in fact 
an amateur, who thought more of style and expres- 
sion than of truth and fact. Caesar, who did not 
profess to be a historian, but only to provide the 
materials for history,^ stands alone in making facts 
more important than words, and rarely troubles his 
reader with speeches or other rhetorical superfluities.^ 
Biographies and autobiographies were fashionable ; of 
the former only those of Cornelius Nepos, one of 
Cicero's many friends, have come down to us, and 
none of the latter, but we know a long list of eminent 
men who wrote their own memoirs, including Catulus 
the elder, Rutilius the famous victim of equestrian 
judges, Sulla, and Lucullus. But far above all other 
prose writers of the age stand two men, neither of 
them Roman by birth, but yet members of the 

^ For this remarkable writer, of whose work only a few fragments survive, 
see Leo, op. cit, p. 340, and Schanz, Gesch. der rim. Literatur, i. p. 278 foU, 

2 Cicero, Brutus, 75, 262. 

^ The other Caesarian writers followed him more or less successfully ; 
Hirtius, who wrote the eighth book of the Gallic War, and the authors of 
the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish Wars (the first possibly by Asinius 
PoUio). 



112 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

senatorial order ; the one a man of encyclopaedic 
learning, with what we may almost call a scientific 
interest in the subjects which he treated in awkward 
and homely Latin, the other a man of comparatively 
little learning, but gifted with so exquisite a sense of 
the beautiful in expression, and at the same time 
with a humanity so real and in that day so rare, that 
it is not without good cause that he has recently 
been called the most highly cultured man of all 
antiquity.^ Of Varro's numerous works we have 
unluckily but few survivals ; of Cicero's we have 
still such a mass as will for ever provide ample 
material for studying the life, the manners, the 
thought of his day. 

A large part of this mass consists of the corre- 
spondence of which we are making such frequent 
use in these chapters. Letter-writing is perhaps the 
most pleasing and genuine of all the literary activities 
of the time ; men took pains to write well, yet not 
with any definite prospect of publication, such as was 
the motive a century later in the days of Seneca and 
Pliny. The nine hundred and odd letters of the 
Ciceronian collection are most of them neither mere 
communications nor yet rhetorical exercises, but real 
letters, the intercourse of intimate friends at a 
distance, in which their inmost thoughts can often 
be seen. Cicero is indeed apt to become rhetorical 
even in his letters, when writing under excitement 
about politics ; but the most delightful letters in the 

^ Leo, op. cit. p. 355. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 113 

collection are those in which he writes to his friends 
in happy and natural language of his daily life and 
occupations, his books, his villas, his children, his 
joys and sorrows. It is strange that the great 
historian of Rome in our time entirely failed to see 
the charm and the value of these letters, as of all 
Cicero's writings ; his countrymen have now agreed 
to differ fr.om him, and to restore a great writer to 
his true position. 

In philosophical receptivity too the brightest and 
finest minds among this aristocracy show an ability 
which is almost astonishing, when we consider that 
there had been no education in Rome worth the 
name until the second century b.c.^ I use the word 
receptivity, because the Romans of our period never 
really learnt to think for themselves ; they never 
grappled with a problem, or struck out a new line 
of thought. But so far as we can judge by Cicero's 
philosophical works, the only ones of his age which 
have come down to us, the power to read with 
understanding and to reproduce with skill was 
unquestionably of a high order. The opportunities 
for study were not wanting ; private libraries were 
numerous, and all Cicero's friends who had collected 
books were glad to let him have the use of them.^ 
Greek philosophers were often domesticated in wealthy 
families, and could discourse with the statesman when 

^ See below, ch. vi. 

2 The passage just cited from the de Finibus (iii. 27) introduces us to the 
library of LucuUus at Tusculum, whither Cicero had gone to consult books, 
and where he found Cato sitting surrounded by volumes of Stoic treatises. 



114 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

he had leisure from public business. Much of this 
was no more than fashion, and real endeavour and 
earnestness were rare ; but the fact remains that one 
philosophical system, more especially on its ethical 
side, took real possession of the best type of Eoman 
mind, and had permanent and saving influence 
on it. 

Stoicism was brought to Eome by Panaetius of 
Rhodes, the intimate friend of Scipio, a mild and 
tactful Greek whose Rhodian birth gave him perhaps 
some advantage in associating with the old allies of 
his state. He came to Rome at a critical moment, 
when even the best men were drifting into pure 
material self-seeking ; and the results of his teaching 
were during two centuries so wholesome and inspiring 
that we may almost think of him as a missionary. 
The ground had been prepared for him in some sense 
by Polybius, who introduced him to Scipio and his 
circle, and who was then engaged in writing his 
history. From Polybius the Romans, the best of 
them at least, first learnt to realise their own empire 
and the great change it had wrought in the world ; 
to think about what they had done and the qualities 
that enabled them to do it. From Panaetius they 
were to learn a philosophical creed which might 
direct and save them in the future, which might 
serve as ballast in public and private life, just when 
the ship was beginning to drift in moral helplessness. 
He was the founder of a school of practical wisdom, 
singularly well adapted to the Roman character and 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 115 

intellect, which were always practical rather than 
speculative ; and far better suited to ordinary human 
life than the old rigid and austere Stoic ethics, of 
which the younger Cato was the only eminent 
Roman disciple. From what we know of Panaetius' 
ethical teaching, — and in the first two books of 
Cicero's work, de Officiis, we have a fairly complete 
view of it, — we do not find the old doctrine that 
absolute wisdom and justice are the only ends to 
pursue, and everything else indifferent ; a doctrine 
which put the old-fashioned Stoic out of court in 
public life. The relative element, the useful, played 
a great part in the teaching of Panaetius. Though 
his system is based on the highest principles to 
which moral teaching could then appeal, it did not 
exclude the give and take, the compromise without 
which no practical man of afi'airs can make way, 
nor yet the wealth and bodily comforts that secure 
leisure for thought.^ 

Panaetius' mission was carried on by another 
Rhodian philosopher, the famous Posidonius, who 
lived long enough to know Cicero himself and many 
of his contemporaries ; a man less inspiring perhaps 
than Panaetius, but of greater knowledge and attain- 
ment ; a traveller, geographer, and a man of the 
world, whose writings on many subjects, though lost 
to us, really lie at the back of a great part of the 

^ The fragments of Panaetius are collected by H. N. Fowler, Bonn, 1885. 
The best account of his teaching known to me is in Schmekel, PMlosophie 
der Mittleren Sloa, p. 18 foil. But all can read the two first books of the 

de Officiis. 



ii6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Koman literary output of his time.^ He was the 
disciple of Panaetius ; envoy from Ehodes to Rome 
in the terrible year 86 ; and later on the inmate of 
Roman families, and the admired friend of Cicero, 
Pompeius, and Varro. Philosophy was only one of 
the many pursuits of this extraordinary man, whose 
literary and historical influence can be traced in 
almost every leading Roman author for a century at 
least ; but his philosophical importance was during 
his lifetime perhaps predominant. The generation 
that knew him was rich in Stoics ; for example, 
Aelius Stilo, the master of Varro, " doctissimus eorum 
temporum," as Gellius calls him ; ^ Rutilius, who was 
mentioned just now as having written memoirs ; and 
among others probably the great lawyer Mucins 
Scaevola. Cato, as we have seen, was not a follower 
of the Roman school of Stoicism, but of the older and 
uncompromising doctrine ; but Cicero, though never 
a professed Stoic, was really deeply influenced, and 
towards the end of his life almost fascinated, by a 
creed which suited his humanity while it stimulated 
his instinct for righteousness.^ And, like Cicero, 
many other men of serious character felt the power 
of Stoicism almost unconsciously, without openly 
professing it. 

Stoicism then was in several ways congenial to 
the Roman spirit, but in one direction it had an 

^ Leo, op. cit. p. 360. Schniekel deals comprehensively with Posidonius' 
philosophy, as reflected in Varro and Cicero, p. 85 foil. 

^ See Professor Reid's introduction to Cicero's Academica, p. 17. Cicero 
considered Posidonius the greatest of the Stoics. — lb. p. 5. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 117 

inspiring influence which has been of lasting moment 
to the world. Up to the time of Panaetius and the 
Scipionic circle the Roman idea and study of law had 
been of a crabbed practical character, wanting in 
breadth of treatment, destitute of any philosophical 
conception of the moral principles which lie behind 
all law and government. The Stoic doctrine of 
universal law ruling the world — a divine law, emanat- 
ing from the universal Reason — seems to have 
called up life in these dry bones. It might be held 
by a Roman Stoic that human law comes into exist- 
ence when man becomes aware of the divine law, 
and recognises its claim upon him. Morality is thus 
identical with law in the widest sense of the word, 
for both are equally called into being by the Right 
Reason, which is the universal primary force. ^ It is 
not possible here to show how this grand and elevating 
idea of law may have afiected Roman jurisprudence, 
but we will just notice that the first quasi -philo- 
sophical treatment of law is found following the age 
of Panaetius and the Scipionic circle ; that the phrase 
ius gentium then begins to take the meaning of 
general principles or rules common to all peoples, and 
founded on "natural reason";^ and that this led by 
degrees to the later idea of the Law of Nature, and 
to the cosmopolitanism of the Roman legal system, 

^ Cic. de Legibus i. affords many examples of this view, which was ap- 
parently that of Posidonius, e.g. 6. 18 and 8. 25. Cp, de Repuhlica, iii. 22, 33. 

2 Gains i. 1 ; Cic. de Officiis iii. 5. 23 ; Mommsen, Staatsrecht, iii. p. 604, 
based on the research of H. Nettleship in Journal of Philology, vol. xiii. 
p. 175. See also Sohm, Institutes of Roman Law, ch. ii. 



ii8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

which came to embrace all peoples and degrees in its 
rational and beneficent influence. If the Greek had 
a genius for beauty, and the Jew for righteousness, 
the Roman had a genius for law ; and the power 
of Stoicism in ennobling and enriching his native 
conception of it is probably not to be easily over- 
estimated. 

Thus behind the stormy scenes of public life in 
this period there is a process going on which will 
be of value not only to the Roman Empire but to 
modern civilisation. It was carried on more especially 
by two men of the highest character, Q. Mucins 
Scaevola, Cicero's adviser in his early days, and 
often his model in later life ; and Servius Sulpicius 
Rufus, his exact contemporary and lifelong friend. 
Neither Scaevola nor Sulpicius were, so far as we 
know, professed disciples of Stoicism ; but that they 
applied perhaps half unconsciously the principles of 
Stoicism to their own legal studies is almost certain. 
The combination of legal training and Stoic influence 
(whether direct or unconscious) seems to have been 
capable of bringing the Roman aristocratic character 
to a high pitch of perfection ; and it will be pleasant 
to take this friend of Cicero, whose public career we 
can clearly trace, and one or two of whose letters we 
still possess, as our example of a really well spent life 
in an age when time and talent were constantly 
abused and wasted. 

Sulpicius and Cicero were born in the same year, 
106 ; they went hand in hand in early life, and 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 119 

remained friends till their deaths in 43, Sulpicius 
dying a few months before Cicero. They were 
both attached in early youth to the Scaevola just 
mentioned, the first of the great series of scientific 
Roman lawyers. But the consulship of Cicero made 
a wide divergence in their lives. In that year 
Sulpicius was a candidate for the consulship and 
failed ; and then, resigning further attempts to obtain 
the highest honour, he retired for the next twelve 
years into private life, devoting himself to the work 
which has made his name immortal. His writings 
are lost ; nothing remains of them but a few chance 
fragments and allusions ; but he was reckoned the 
second of the great writers on legal subjects, and 
it is probable that he contributed as much as any of 
them to the work of making Roman law what it has 
been as a power in the world, a factor in modern 
civilisation. For he treated it, as his friend said of 
him,^ with the hand and mind of an artist, laying 
out his whole subject and distributing it into its 
constituent parts, by definition and interpretation 
making clear what seemed obscure, and distinguishing 
the false from the true in legal principle. In the 
splendid panegyric pronounced on him in the senate 
after his death ,^ Cicero again emphatically declared 
him to be unrivalled in jurisprudence. In beautiful 
but untranslatable language he claims that he was 

^ Brutus 41. 151, where he plainly ranks him above Scaevola, The 
passage is a most interesting one, deserving careful attention. 

2 The Ninth Philippic : the passage referred to in the text is 5. 10 foil. 



I20 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

"non magis iuris consultus, quam iustitiae," — an 
encomium which all great lawyers might well envy ; 
he aimed rather at enabling men to be rid of litigation 
than at encouraging them to engage in it. 

From such passages we might conjecture, even if 
we knew nothing more about him, that Sulpicius was 
a man of very fine clay, of real humanitas in the 
widest sense of that expressive word ; and this is 
entirely borne out in other ways.^ Emerging at last 
from retirement, he stood agaia for the consulship in 
52 B.C., and was elected. The year of his office, 51, 
was the first in which the enemies of Caesar, with Cato 
at their head, began to attack his position and clamour 
for his recall from his command ; this violent hostility 
Sulpicius tried, not without temporary success, to 
restrain, and the fact that a man of so just a mind 
should have taken this line is one of the best 
arguments for the reasonableness of Caesar's cause. ^ 
When war broke out he was greatly perplexed how 
to act ; his breadth of view made decision difficult, 
and he seems to have been at all times more a student 
than a man of action. With some heart-burnings he 
joined Caesar in the struggle, and accepted from him 
the government of Achaia ; it was at this time that 
he wrote the famous letter of consolation to Cicero 
on the death of his beloved daughter TuUia, which 

^ I omit pro Murena, chs. vii. and xxi., for want of space. Sulpicius was 
opposing Cicero in this case, and the latter's allusions to him are useful 
specimens of the good breeding spoken of above. 

2 See Dio Cassius xl. 59 ; and Cic. ad Fam. iv. 1 and 3, to Sulpicius, with 
allusions to his consulship. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 121 

is full of true feeling and kindliness, though evidently 
composed with effort, if not with difficulty. After 
Caesar's death he of course acted with Cicero against 
Antony, and in the spring of 43, making always for 
peace and good-will, he gave his life for his country 
in a way that claims our admiration more really 
than the suicide of Cato the professional Stoic ; he 
headed an embassy to Antony, though dangerously 
ill at the time, and died in this last effort to 
obtain a hearing for the voice of justice. He has 
a monumentum aere perennius in the speech of his 
old friend urging the senaj;e to vote him a public 
funeral and a statue, as one who had laid down his 
life for his country. 

We must now turn to consider how the mis- 
chievous side of the new Greek culture, in combina- 
tion with other tendencies of the time, found its 
way into weak points in the armour of the Roman 
aristocracy. 

The pursuit of ease and pleasure, to which the 
attainment of wealth and political power were too 
often merely subordinated, is a leading characteristic 
of the time. It is seen in many different forms, in 
many different types of character ; but at the root 
of the whole corruption is the spirit of the coarser 
side of Epicureanism. As with Roman Stoicism, so 
too with Roman Epicureanism, it is not so much the 
professed holding of philosophical tenets that affected 
life ; in the case of the latter system, it was the 



122 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

coincidence of its popularity with the decay of the 
old Eoman faith and morality, and with the abnormal 
opportunities of self-indulgence. Cato as a professed 
Stoic, Lucretius as an enthusiastic Epicurean, stand 
quite apart from the mass of men who were actuated 
one way or the other by these philosophical creeds. 
The majority simply played with the philosophy, 
while following the natural bent of their individual 
character; but such dilettanteism was often quite 
enough to affect that character permanently for good 
or evil. 

" Epicureanism popularised inevitably turns to 
vice." Was it really popular at Rome ? Cicero tells 
us in a valuable passage ^ that one Amafinius had 
written on it, and that a great number of copies of his 
book were sold, partly because the arguments were easy 
to follow, partly because the doctrine was pleasant, and 
partly too because men failed to get hold of anything 
better. The date of this Amafinius is uncertain, but 
it is probable that Cicero is here speaking of the 
latter part of the second century B.C. ; and he goes 
on to say that other writers took up the same line 
of teaching, and established it over the whole of Italy 
(Italiam totam occupaverunt). If this was in the time 
of the Social and Civil Wars, of the proscriptions, 
of increasing crime and self-seeking, we can well 
understand that the doctrine was popular. We have 
a remarkable example of it in the life of a public 
man of Cicero's own time, the object of the most 

^ Tiisc. Disp. iv. 3. 6. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 123 

envenomed invective that lie ever uttered.^ We 
cannot believe a tithe of what he says about this man, 
Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58 ; but in this particular 
matter of the damage done him by Epicurean teach- 
ing we have independent evidence which confirms it. 
Piso, then a young man, made acquaintance with a 
G-reek of this school of thought, learnt from him 
that pleasure was the sole end of life, and failing to 
appreciate the true meaning and bearing of the 
doctrine, fell into the trap. It was a dangerous 
doctrine, Cicero says, for a youth of no remarkable 
intelligence ; and the tutor, instead of being the 
young man's guide to virtue, was used by him as 
an authority for vice.^ This Greek was a certain 
Philodemus, a few of whose poems are preserved in 
the Greek Anthology ; and a glance at them will show 
at once how dangerous such a man would be as the 
companion of a Roman youth. He may not himself 
have been a bad man — Cicero indeed rather suggests 
the contrary, calling him vere humanus — but the air 
about him was poisonous. In his pupil, if we can 
trust in the smallest degree the picture drawn of 
him by Cicero, we may see a specimen of the young 
men of the age whose talents might have made them 

^ The speech in Pisonem ; cp. the de Provmciis consularibus, 1-6. This 
Piso was the father of Caesar's wife Calpurnia, who survives in Shakespeare. 

^ The difficult passage in which Cicero describes the perversion of this 
character under the influence of Philodemus, has been skilfully translated 
by Dr. Mahaffy in his Cheek World under Roman Sway, p. 126 foil. ; and the 
reader may do well to refer to his whole treatment of the practical result of 
Epicureanism. 



124 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

useful in the world, but for tlie strength of the 
current that drew them into self-indulgence. 

Not only the pursuit of pleasure, but its correlative, 
the avoidance of work and duty, can be abundantly 
illustrated in this age ; and this too may have had 
a subtle connexion with Epicurean teaching, which 
had always discouraged the individual from distrac- 
tion in the service of the State, as disturbing to the 
free development of his own virtue. Sulla did much 
hard work, but made the serious blunder of retiring 
to enjoy himself just when his new constitutional 
machinery needed the most careful watching and 
tending. Lucullus, after showing a wonderful capacity 
for work and a greater genius for war than perhaps 
any man of his time, retired from public life as a 
millionaire and a quietist, to enjoy the wealth that 
has become proverbial, and a luxury that is astonish- 
ing, even if we make due allowance for the exagger- 
ation of our accounts of it. To his library we have 
already been introduced ; those who would see him 
in his banqueting-hall, or rather one of the many 
in his palace, may turn to the fortieth chapter of 
Plutarch's most interesting Life of him, and read the 
story there told of the dinner he gave to Cicero and 
Pompeius in the "Apollo" dining-room.^ 

The same cynical carelessness about public affairs 
and neglect of duty, as compared with private ease or 
advantage, seems to have been characteristic of the 

^ This chapter is also useful as illustrating the urbanity of manners, for 
Lucullus and Pompeius were political enemies. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 125 

ordinary senator. Active and busy in his own interest, 
he was indifferent to that of the State. There are 
distinct signs that the attendance in the senate was 
not good. When Cicero was away in Cilicia his 
correspondent writes of difficulties in getting together 
a sufficient number even for such important business 
as the settlement of provincial governments.^ On 
the other hand, much private business was done, and 
many jobs perpetrated, in a thin senate ; in 66 a 
tribune proposed that no senator should be dispensed 
from the action of a law unless two hundred were 
present.^ It was in such a thin senate, we may be 
sure, that the virtuous Brutus was dispensed from 
the law which forbade lending to foreign borrowers 
in Rome, and thus was enabled to lend to the miser- 
able Salaminians of Cyprus at 48 per cent, and to 
recover his money under the bond.^ Writing to his 
brother in December 57, Cicero speaks of business 
done in a senate full for the time of year, which was 
midwinter, just before the Saturnalia, when only two 
hundred were present out of about six hundred. In 
February 54, a month when the senate had always 
much business to get through, it was so cold one day 
that the few members present clamoured for dismissal 
and obtained it.* And when the senate did meet there 
was a constant tendency to let things go. No reform 
of procedure is mentioned as even thought of, at a 

^ ad Fam. viii. 5 fin. ; viii. 9. 2. 

^ See the introduction of Asconius to Cicero pro Gornelio, ed. Clark, p. 58. 

8 ad Att. V. 21. 11, 13. « ad Q. frat. ii. 1. 1 ; ii. 10. 1. 



126 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

time when it was far more necessary than in our 
Parliament ; business was talked about, postponed, 
obstructed, and personal animosities and private 
interests seem, so far as we can judge from the cor- 
respondence of the time, to have been predominant. 
With wearisome iteration the letters speak of nothing 
done, of business postponed, or of the passing of some 
senatus consultum,the utter futility of which is obvious 
even now.^ Even the magistrates seem to have been 
growing careless ; we hear of a praetor presiding in 
the court de repetundis who had not taken the 
trouble to acquaint himself with the text of the law 
which governed its procedure ; ^ and that praetors 
were worse than careless about their action in civil 
cases is proved by another law of the same tribune 
Cornelius mentioned just now, " that praetors should 
abide by the rules laid down in their edicts." ^ 

But all these futilities, and much of the same kind 
outside of the senate, together with the quarrels of 
individuals, the chances and incidents of elections, 
and all such gossip as forms the staple commodity of 
the society papers of to-day, were a source of infinite 
delight to another type of pleasure -loving public 
man, the last to be illustrated here. 

If the older noble families were apathetic and idle, 

^ The letters written immediately after Cicero's return from exile are the 
best examples of this paralysis of business, e.g. ad Fam. i. 4 ; ad Q. F. ii. 3. 
See a useful paper by P. Groebe in KUo, vol. v. p. 229. 

^ This appears from a letter of Caelius to Cicero in 51. — ad Fam. viii. 8. 3. 

^ Asconius in Comelianum, ed, Clark, p. 59. "Utpraetores ex edictis 
suis perpetuis ius dicerent." 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 127 

there were plenty of young men, rising most often 
from the class below, whose minds were intensely 
active — active in the pursuit of pleasure, but pleasure 
in the comparatively harmless form of amusement and 
excitement. One of these, the son of a banker at 
Puteoli, Marcus Caelius Rufus, stands out as a living 
portrait in his own letters to Cicero, of which no 
fewer than seventeen are preserved.^ Of his early 
years too we know a good deal, told us in the speech 
in defence of him spoken by Cicero in the year 56 ; 
and these combined sources of information make him 
the most interesting figure in the life of his age. 
M. Boissier has written a delightful essay on him 
in his Ciceron et ses amis, and Professor Tyrrell has 
done the like in the introduction to the fourth 
volume of his edition of Cicero's letters ; but they have 
treated him less as a type of the youth of his day 
than as the friend and pupil of Cicero. Caelius will 
always repay fresh study ; he was amusing and 
interesting to his contemporaries, and so he will be 
for ever to us. He is a veritable Proteus — you 
never know what shape he will take next ; 

Omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum — 

we can trace no less than six such transformations 
in the story of his life. And this instability, let 
us note at once, was not the restlessness of a jaded 
roue, but the coruscation of a clever mind wholly 
without principle, intensely interested in his mondCf 

^ All his letters are in the eighth book of those ad Familiares. 



128 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

in the life in whicli he moved, with all its enjoyment 
and excitement. 

Caelius' father brought his son to Cicero, as soon 
as he had taken his toga virilis, to study law and 
oratory, and Cicero was evidently attracted by the 
bright and lively boy ; he never deserted him, and 
the last letter of Caelius to his old preceptor was 
written only just before his own sad end. But 
Cicero was not the man to keep an unstable character 
out of mischief; he loved young men, especially 
clever ones, and was apt to take an optimistic view 
of them, as he did of his own son and nephew. 
Caelius, always attracted by novelty, left Cicero and 
attached himself to Catiline ; and for this vagary, as 
well as for his own want of success in controllino; his 
pupil, Cicero rather awkwardly and amusingly apolo- 
gises in the early chapters of his speech in his 
defence. Wild oats must be sown, he says ; when a 
youth has given full fling to his propensities to vice, 
they will leave him, and he may become a useful 
citizen, — a dangerous view of a preceptor's duty, 
which reminds us of the treatment of the boy Nero 
by his philosopher guardian long afterwards.^ 

Caelius escaped the fate of Catiline and his crew 
only to fall into the hands of another clique not less 
dangerous for his moral welfare. He became one of 
a group of brilliant young men, among whom were 
probably Catullus and Calvus the poets, who were 
lovers, and passionate lovers, of the infamous Clodia ; 

^ Tacitus, Annals xiJi. 2: " voluptatibus concessis. " 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 129 

they were needy, she found them money, and they 
hovered about her like moths about a candle. In 
such a life of passion and pleasure quarrels were 
inevitable. If the Lesbia of Catullus be Clodia, as 
we may believe, she had thrown the poet over with 
a light heart. It was apparently of his own free 
will that Caelius deserted her : in revenge she turned 
upon him with an accusation of theft and attempt 
to poison. What truth there was in the charges we 
do not really know, but Cicero defended him success- 
fully, and in this way we come to know the details 
of this unsteady life. 

In gratitude, and possibly in shame, Caelius now 
returned to his old friend, and abandoned the whole 
ring of his vicious companions for diligent practice 
in the courts, where he obtained considerable fame 
as an orator. A fragment of a speech of his pre- 
served by Quintilian shows, as Professor Tyrrell ob- 
serves, wonderful power of graphic and picturesque 
utterance.^ Cicero, writing of him after his death,^ says 
that he was at this time on the right side in politics, 
and that as tribune of the plebs in 56 he successfully 
supported the good cause, and checked revolutionary 
and seditious movements. All was going well with 
him until Cicero went as governor to Cilicia in 51. 
Cicero seems to have felt complete confidence in him, 
and invited him to become his confidential political 
correspondent ; fifteen out of his seventeen letters 
were written in this capacity. These letters show 

^ Quintil. iv. 2. 123. 2 Brutus 79. 273. 

K 



I30 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

us the man as clearly as if we had his diary before 
us. Caelius is no idle scamp or lazy Epicurean ; 
his mind is constantly active : nothing escapes his 
notice : the minutest and most sordid things delight 
him. He is bright, happy, witty, frivolous, and 
doubtless lovable. It is amusing to see how Cicero 
himself now and again catches the infection, and 
tries (in vain) to write in the same frivolous manner.^ 
Caelius has some political insight ; he sees civil war 
approaching, but he takes it all as a game, and on 
the eve of events which were to shake the world he 
trifles with the symptoms as though they were the 
silliest gossip of the capital.^ In none of these 
letters is there the smallest vestige of principle to be 
found. On the very eve of civil war he tells Cicero ^ 
that as soon as war breaks out the right thing to do 
is to join the stronger side. Judging Caesar's side 
to be the stronger, he joined it accordingly, and did 
his best to induce Cicero to do the same. As 
M. Boissier happily says, he never cared to " manager 
ses transitions." 

He had, however, to discover that if to change 
over to Caesar was the safer course, to turn a political 
somersault once more, to try and undermine the 
work of the master, meant simply ruin. We have 
the story of his sixth and last transformation from 

^ e.g. ad Fam. ii. 13. 3. 

^ Exactly the same combination of real interest in, and frivolous treat- 
ment of, politics is to be found in the early letters of Horace Walpole to Sir 
H. Mann, especially those of the year 1742. 

' ad Fam. viii. 14. 3. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 131 

Caesar himself, who was not, however, in Italy at the 
time.^ Credit in Italy had been seriously upset by 
the outbreak of Civil War, and Caesar had been at 
much pains to steady it by an ordinance which has 
been alluded to in the last chapter.^ In 48 Caelius 
was praetor; in the master's absence he suddenly 
took up the cause of the debtors, and tried to evoke 
appeals against the decisions of his colleague Tre- 
bonius, — a great lawyer and a just man. Failing 
in this, he started as a downright revolutionary, 
proposing first the abolition of house-rent, and finally 
the abolition of all debts ; and Milo, in exile at 
Massilia, was summoned to help him to raise Italy 
against Caesar. This was too much, and both were 
quickly caught and killed as they were stirring 
up gladiators and other slave -bands among the 
latifundia of South Italy. 

Caelius' letters give us a chance of seeing what 
that life of the Forum really was which so fascinated 
the young men of the day, and some of the old, such 
as Cicero himself. We can see these children play- 
ing on the very edge of the crater, like the French 
noblesse before the Revolution. In both cases there 
was a semi-consciousness that the eruption was not 
far off, — but they went on playing. What was it 
that so greatly amused and pleased them ? 

What Caelius is always writing of is mainly 
elections and canvassing, accusations and trials, games 
and shows. Elections he treats as pure sport, as a 

^ Caesar, Sell. Cvo. iii. 20 foil. , " See above, p. 86 ; cp. p. 58. 



132 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

kind of enjoyable gambling, or as a means of spiting 
some one whom you want to annoy. With elections 
accusations were often connected : if a man were 
accused before his election he could not continue to 
stand ; if condemned after it he was disqualified ; here 
were ways in which personal spite might deprive him 
of success at the last moment.^ Accusations, too, 
were of course the best means by which an ambitious 
young man could come to the front. The whole 
number of trials mentioned by Caelius is astonishing ; 
sometimes there is such a complication of them as is 
difficult to follow. Every one is ready to lay an 
accusation, without the smallest regard for truth. 
Young Appius Claudius accuses Servilius, and makes 
a mess of the attack, while the praetor mismanages 
the conduct of the trial, so that nothing comes of it ; 
but finally Appius is himself accused by the Servilii 
de vi, in order to keep him from further attacks on. 
Servilius ! ^ Appius the father quarrelled with Caelius 
and egged on others to accuse him, though he was 
curule aedile at the time. " Their impudence was so 
boundless that they secured that an information 
should be laid against me for a very serious crime 
(under the Scantinian law). Scarcely had Pola got 
the words out of his mouth, when I laid an informa- 
tion under the same law against the censor, Appius. 
I never saw a more successful stroke ! " ^ 

Of the games, and the panthers to be exhibited at 

* So for example Servaeus ia disqualified, ad Fam. viii. 4. 1. 
2 lb, viii. 8. 2. » lb. 8. 12. 



IV THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY 133 

them, about whicli Caelius is for ever worrying his 
friend in Cilicia, we shall see something in another 
chapter. There is plenty of other gossip in these 
letters, and gossip often about unsavoury matters 
which need not be noticed here. It lets in a flood of 
light upon the causes of the general incompetence 
and inefficiency ; the life of the Forum was a demoral- 
ising one : 

Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti 
uerba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose : 
blanditia certare, bonum simulare uirum se : 
insidiaa facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.^ 

From what has been said in this sketch it should 
be clear that we have in the aristocracy of this period 
a complicated society, the various aspects of which 
can hardly be united in a single picture. It is partly 
a hereditary aristocracy, with all the pride and 
exclusiveness of a group of old families accustomed 
to power and consequence. It is in the main a 
society of gentlemen, dignified in manner, and kindly 
towards each other, and it is also a society of high 
culture and literary ability, though poor in creative 
genius, and unimaginative. On the other hand, it 
is a class which has lost its interest in the State, and 
is energetic only when pursuing its own interests : 
pleasure -loving, luxurious, gossiping, trifling with 
serious matters, short-sighted in politics because 
anxious only for personal advance. " Rari nantes in 
gurgite vasto " are the men who are really in earnest, 

^ Lucilius, Fragm. 9, ed. Baehrens. 



134 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap.iv 

but they are there ; we must not forget that in 
Lucretius and Cicero this society produced one of the 
greatest poets and one of the most perfect prose 
writers that the world treasures ; in Sulpicius a 
lawyer of permanent value to humanity, and in 
Caesar not only an author and a scholar but a man 
of action unrivalled in capacity and industry. 



CHAPTER V 

MARRIAGE : AND THE ROMAN LADY 

In order to appreciate the position of women of 
various types in the society we are examining, it is 
necessary to make it clear what Roman marriage 
originally and ideally meant. In any society, it will 
be found that the position and influence of woman 
can be fairly well discerned from the nature of the 
marriage ceremony and the conditions under which it 
is carried out. At Rome, in all periods of her history, 
a iustwm matrimonium, i.e. a marriage sanctioned by 
law and religion, and therefore entirely legal in all 
its results, was a matter of great moment, not to be 
achieved without many forms and ceremonies. The 
reason for this elaboration is obvious, at any rate to 
any one who has some acquaintance with ancient life 
in Greece or Italy. As we shall see later on, the 
house was a residence for the divine members of the 
family, as well as the human ; the entrance, therefore, 
of a bride into the household, — of one, that is, who 
had no part nor lot in that family life — meant some 
straining of the relation between the divine and 

135 



136 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

human members. The human part of the family 
brings in a new member, but it has to be assured that 
the divine part is willing to accept her before the step 
taken can be regarded as complete. She has to enter 
the family in such a way as to be able to share in its 
sacra, i.e. in the worship of the household spirits, the 
ancestors in their tombs, or in any special cult 
attached to the family. In order to secure this 
eligibility, she was in the earliest times subjected to 
a ceremony which was clearly of a sacramental 
character, and which had as its effect the transference 
of the bride from the hand {manus) of her father, 
i.e. from absolute subjection to him as the head 
of her own family, to the hand of her husband, i.e. 
to absolute subjection to him as the head of her new 
family. 

This sacramental ceremony was called confar- 
reatio, because a sacred cake, made of the old Italian 
grain called far, and offered to Jupiter Farreus,^ was 
partaken of by bride and bridegroom, in the presence 
of the Pontifex Maximus, the Flamen Dialis, and ten 
other witnesses. At such a ceremony the auspices 
had of course been taken, and apparently a victim 
was also slain, and offered probably to Ceres, the 
skin of which was stretched over two seats (sellae), 

* This probably means that the deity was believed to reside in the cake, 
and that the communicants not only entered into communion with each 
other in eating of it, but also with him. It is in fact exactly analogous to 
the sacramental ceremony of the Latin festival, in which each city jiartook 
of the sacred victim, in that case a white heifer. See Fowler, Soman 
Festivals, p. 96 and reff. 



V MARRIAGE 137 

on whicli the bride and bridegroom had to sit.^ 
These details of the early form of patrician marriage 
are only mentioned here to make the religious char- 
acter of the Roman idea of the rite quite plain ; in 
other words, to prove that the entrance of a bride 
into a family from outside was a matter of very great 
difficulty and seriousness, not to be achieved without 
special aid and the intervention of the gods. We 
may even go so far as to say that the new mater- 
familias was in some sort a priestess of the household, 
and that she must undergo a solemn initiation before 
assuming that position. And we may still further 
illustrate the mystical religious nature of the whole 
rite, if we remember that throughout Roman history 
no one could hold the priesthood of Jupiter (fla- 
minium diale), or that of Mars or Quirinus, or of the 
Rex sacrorum, who had not been born of parents 
wedded by confarreatio, and that in each case the 
priest himself must be married by the same ceremony.^ 
This last mentioned fact may also serve to remind 
us that it was not only the family and its sacra, its 
life and its maintenance, that called for the cere- 
monies making up a iustum matrimonium, but also 
the State and its sacra, its life and its maintenance.^ 
As confarreatio had as its immediate object the 
providing of a materfamilias fully qualified in all 

^ This interesting custom is recorded by Servius {ad Aen. iv. 374). For 
the whole ceremony of confarreatio see De Marchi, La Eeligione nella vita 
domestica, p. 155 foil. ; Marquardt, Privatlehen, p. 32 foil. Cp. also 
Gains i. 112. 

2 Gains I.e. s Cic. de Off. i. 17. 54. 



138 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

her various functions, and as its further object the 
providing of persons legally qualified to perform the 
most important sacra of the state ; so marriage, in 
whatever form, had as its object at once the main- 
tenance of the family and its sacra and the pro- 
duction of men able to serve the State in peace 
and war. To be a Roman citizen you must be the 
product of a iustum matrimonium. From this 
initial fact flow all the iura or rights which together 
make up citizenship ; whether the private rights, 
which enable you to hold and transfer and to inherit 
property under the shelter of the Roman law,^ or 
the public rights, which protect your person against 
violence and murder, and enable you to give your 
vote in the public assembly and to seek election to 
magistracies.^ 

Marriage then was a matter of the utmost import- 
ance in Roman life, and in all the forms of it we find 
this importance marked by due solemnity of ritual. 
In two other forms, besides confarreatio, the bride 
could be brought under the hand of her husband, 
viz., coemptio and usus, with which we are not here 
specially concerned ; for long before the last century 
of the Republic all three methods had become practi- 
cally obsolete, or were only occasionally used for 
particular purposes. In the course of time it had 
been found more convenient for a woman to remain 

^ i.e. ius commercii and ius connubii : the former enabling a man to 
claim the protection of the courts in all cases relating to property, the latter 
to claim the same protection in cases of disputed inheritance, 

^ i.e. ius provocationis, ius suffragii, ius honorum. 



V MARRIAGE 139 

after her marriage in the hand of her father, or if 
he were dead, in the " tutela " of a guardian (tutor), 
than to pass into that of her husband; for in the 
latter case her property became absolutely his. The 
natural tendency to escape from the restrictions of 
marital manus may be illustrated by a case such 
as the following : a woman under the tutela of a 
guardian wishes to marry ; if she does so, and passes 
under the manus of her husband, her tutor loses all 
control over her property, which may probably be of 
great importance for the family she is leaving; he 
therefore naturally objects to such a marriage, and 
urges that she should be married without manus} 
In fact the interests of her own family would often 
clash with those of the one she was about to enter, 
and a compromise could be effected by the abandon- 
ment of marriage cum manu. 

Now this, the abandonment of marriage cum, 
manu, means simply that certain legal consequences 
of the marriage ceremony were dropped, and with 
them just those parts of the ceremony which pro- 
duced these consequences. Otherwise the marriage 
was absolutely as valid for all purposes private and 
public as it could be made even by confarreatio itself. 
The sacramental part was absent, and the survival of 
the features of marriage by purchase, which we may 

^ This is how I understand Cuq, Institutions juridiques des Romains, 
p. 223. In the well known Laudatio Turiae we have a curious case of a 
re-marriage by coemptio with manus, for a particular purpose, connected of 
course with money matters. See Mommsen's Commentary, reprinted in his 
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. i. 



I40 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

see in the form of coemptio, was also absent ; but in 
all other respects the marriage ceremony was the 
same as in marriage cum manu. It retained all 
essential religious features, losing only a part of its 
legal character. It will be as well briefly to describe 
a Roman wedding of the type common in the last 
two centuries of the Republic. 

To begin with, the boy and girl — for such they 
were, as we should look on them, even at the time of 
marriage — have been betrothed, in all probability, 
long before. Cicero tells us that he betrothed his 
daughter TuUia to Calpurnius Piso Frugi early in 66 
B.C. ; the marriage took place in 63. Tullia seems to 
have been born in 76, so that she was ten years old 
at the time of betrothal and thirteen at that of 
marriage. This is probably typical of what usually 
happened; and it shows that the matter was really 
entirely in the hands of the parents. It was a 
family arrangement, a mariage de convenance, as has 
been and is the practice among many peoples, ancient 
and modern.^ The betrothal was indeed a promise 
rather than a definite contract, and might be broken 
off without illegality ; and thus if there were a 
strong dislike on the part of either girl or boy a way 
of escape could be found. ^ However this may be, we 
may be sure that the idea of the marriage was not 
that of a union for love, though it was distinguished 

^ Westermarck, History of HuTrmn Marriage, ch. x. 

^ See, however, the curious passage quoted by Gellius (iv. 4. 2) from Serv. 
Sulpicius, the great jurist (above, p. 118 foil.), on sponsalia in Latium down 
to 89 B.C. 



MARRIAGE 141 

from concubinage by an " affectio maritalis " as well as 
by legal forms, and though a true attachment might, 
and often did, as in modern times in like circum- 
stances, arise out of it. It was the idea of the 
service of the family and the State that lay at the 
root of the union. This is well illustrated, like so 
many other Roman ideas, in the Aeneid of Virgil. 
Those who persist in looking on Aeneas with modern 
eyes, and convict him of perfidy towards Dido, forget 
that his passion for Dido was a sudden one, not 
sanctioned by the gods or by favourable auspices, 
and that the ultimate union with Lavinia, for whom 
he forms no such attachment, was one which would 
recommend itself to every Roman as justified by the 
advantage to the State. The poet, it is true, betrays 
his own intense humanity in his treatment of the 
fate of Dido, but he does so in spite of his theme, — 
the duty of every Roman to his family and the State. 
A Roman would no doubt fall in love, like a youth 
of any other nation, but his passion had nothing to 
do with his life of duty as a Roman. This idea of 
marriage had serious consequences, to which we shall 
return later on. 

When the day for the wedding arrives, our bride 
assumes her bridal dress, laying aside the toga 
praetexta of her childhood and dedicating her dolls 
to the Lar of her family ; and wearing the reddish 
veil (flammeum) and the woollen girdle fastened 
with a knot called the knot of Hercules,'^ she awaits 

* For the other details of the dress, see Marq. PrivatUben, p. 43. 



142 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the arrival of the bridegroom in her father's house. 
Meanwhile the auspices are being taken ;^ in earlier 
times this was done by observing the flight of birds, 
but now by examination of the entrails of a victim, 
apparently a sheep. If this is satisfactory the 
youthful pair declare their consent to the union and 
join their right hands as directed by a pronuba, i.e. 
a married woman, who acts as a kind of priestess. 
Then after another sacrifice and a wedding feast, the 
bride is conducted from her old home to that of her 
husband, accompanied by three boys, sons of living 
parents, one carrying a torch while the other two 
lead her by either hand ; fl.ute-players go before, and 
nuts are thrown to the boys. This deductio, charm- 
ingly described in the beautiful sixty-fifth poem of 
Catullus, is full of interesting detail which must be 
omitted here. When the bridegroom's house is reached, 
the bride smears the doorposts with fat and oil and 
ties a woollen fillet round each : she is then lifted 
over the threshold, is taken by her husband into 
the partnership of fire and water — the essentials of 
domestic life — and passes into the atrium. The 
morrow will find her a materfamilias, sitting among 
her maids in that atrium, or in the more private 
apartments behind it : 

Claudite ostia, virgines 
Lusimus satis. At boni 
Coniuges, bene vivite, et 
Munere assiduo valentem 
Exercete iuventam. 

1 Cic. de Div. i. 16. 28. 



V MARRIAGE 143 

y 

Even tlie dissipated Catullus could not but treat 
the subject of marriage with dignity and tenderness, 
and in this last stanza of his poem he alludes to the 
duties of a married pair in language which would 
have satisfied the strictest Roman. He has also 
touched another chord which would echo in the heart 
of every good citizen, in the delicious lines which 
just precede those quoted, and anticipate the child — 
a son of course — that is to be born, and that will 
lie in his mother's arms holding out his little hands, 
and smiling on his father.^ Nothing can better 
illustrate the contrast in the mind of the Roman 
between passionate love and serious marriage than 
a comparison of this lovely poem with those which 
tell the sordid tale of the poet's intrigues with Lesbia 
(Clodia). The beauty and gravitas of married life as 
it used to be are still felt and still found, but the 
depths of human feeling are not stirred by them. 
Love lies beyond, is a fact outside the pale of the 
ordered life of the family or the State. 

No one who studies this ceremonial of Roman 
marriage, in the light of the ideas which it indicates 
and reflects, can avoid the conclusion that the 
position of the married woman must have been one 
of substantial dignity, calling for and calling out 
a corresponding type of character. Beyond doubt 
the position of the Roman materfamilias was a much 
more dignified one than that of the Greek wife. She 

^ These lines suggested to Virgil the famous four at the end of the fourth 
Eclogue. See Virgil's *' Messianic Eclogue" p. 72. 



s/ 



144 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

was far indeed from being a mere drudge or squaw ; 
she shared with her husband in all the duties of the 
household, including those of religion, and within 
the house itself she was practically supreme.^ She 
lived in the atrium, and was not shut away in a 
women's chamber ; she nursed her own children and 
brought them up ; she had entire control of the female 
slaves who were her maids ; she took her meals with 
her husband, but sitting, not reclining, and abstaining 
from wine ; in all practical matters she was consulted, 
and only on questions political or intellectual was 
she expected to be silent. When she went out 
arrayed in the graceful stola matronalis, she was 
treated with respect, and the passers-by made way 
for her ; but it is characteristic of her position that 
she did not as a rule leave the house without the 
knowledge of her husband, or without an escort.^ -■' 

In keeping with this dignified position was the 
ideal character of the materfamilias. Ideal we must 
call it, for it does not in all respects coincide with 
the tradition of Eoman women even in early times ; 
but we must remember that at all periods of Roman 
history the woman whose memory survives is apt 
to be the woman who is not the ideal matron, but 
one who forces herself into notice by violating the 

■^ She was addressed as domina by all members of the family. See 
Marquardt, Privatlehen, p. 57 note 3. It should be noted that she had brought 
a contribution to the family resources in the form of a dowry (dos), given her 
by her father to maintain her position. 

2 These details are drawn chiefly from the sixth book of Valerius 
Maximus, de Pvdicitia. 



MARRIAGE 145 

traditions of womanhood. The typical matron would 
assuredly never dream of playing a part in history ; 
her influence was behind the scenes, and therefore 
proportionally powerful. The legendary mother of 
Coriolanus (the Volumnia of Shakespeare), Cornelia 
the mother of the Gracchi, Aurelia, Caesar's mother, 
and Julia his daughter, did indirectly play a far 
greater part in public life than the loud and vicious 
ladies who have left behind them names famous or 
infamous ; but they never claimed the recognition of 
their power. 

This peculiar character of the Roman matron, 
a combination of dignity, industry, and practical 
wisdom, was exactly suited to attract the attention 
of a gentle philosopher like Plutarch, who loved, with 
genuine moral fervour, all that was noble and honest 
in human nature. Not only does he constantly refer 
to the Roman ladies and their character in his Lives 
and his Morals, but in his series of more than a 
hundred " Roman questions " the first nine, as well as 
many others, are concerned with marriage and the 
household life ; and in his treatise called Coniugalia 
'praecepta he reflects many of the features of the 
Roman matron. From him, in Sir Thomas North's 
translation, Shakespeare drew the inspiration which 
enabled him to produce on the Elizabethan stage at 
least one such typical matron. In Coriolanus he has 
followed Plutarch so closely that the reader may 
almost be referred to him as an authority ; and in 
the contrast between the austere and dignified 

L 



146 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Volumnia and the passionate and voluptuous Cleo- 
patra of the later play, the poet's imagination seems 
to have been guided by a true historical instinct. 

We need not doubt that the austere matron of the 
old type survived into the age we are specially con- 
cerned with ; but we hardly come across her in the 
literature of the time, just because she was living her 
own useful life, and did not seek publicity. Chance 
has indeed preserved for us on stone the story of a 
wonderful lady, whose early years of married life 
were spent in the trying time of the civil wars of 
49-43 B.C., and who, if a devoted husband's praises are 
to be trusted, as indeed they may be, was a woman 
of the finest Eoman cast, and endowed with such a 
combination of practical virtues as we should hardly 
have expected even in a Roman matron. But we 
shall return to this inscription later on. 

The ladies whom we meet with in Cicero's letters 
and in the other hterature of the last age of the 
Republic are not of this type. Since the second 
Punic war the Roman lady has changed, like every- 
thing else Roman. It is not possible here to trace 
the history of the change in detail, but we may note 
that it seems to have begun within the household, in 
matters of dress and expense, and later on affected 
the life and bearing of women in society and politics. 
Marriages cum manu became unusual : the wife 
remained in the potestas of her father, who in most 
cases, doubtless, ceased to trouble himself about her, 
and as her property did not pass to her husband, she 



V MARRIAGE 147 

could not but obtain a new position of independence. 
Women began to be ricb, and in the year 169 B.C. 
a law was passed (lex Voconia) forbidding women of 
the highest census^ (who alone would probably be 
concerned) to inherit legacies. Even before the end 
of the great war, and when private luxury would 
seem out of place, it had been proposed to abolish 
the Oppian law, which placed restrictions on the 
ornaments and apparel of women ; and in spite of 
the vehement opposition of Cato, then a young man, 
the proposal was successful.^ At the same time 
divorce, which had probably never been impossible 
though it must have been rare,^ began to be a 
common practice. We find to our surprise that the 
virtuous Aemilius Paullus, in other respects a model 
paterfamilias, put away his wife, and when asked 
why he did so, replied that a woman might be 
excellent in the eyes of her neighbours, but that only 
a husband could tell where the shoe pinched.'* And 
in estimating the changed position of women within 
the family we must not forget the fact that in the 
course of the long and unceasing wars of the second 
century B.C., husbands were away from home for 

^ This is proved by an allusion to Cato's speech in support of the law, in 
Gellius, Nod. Att. vi. 13. 

2 Livy xxxiv. 1 foil., where the speech of Cato is reproduced in Livy's 
language and with "modern" rhetoric. 

3 De Marchi, op. cit. p. 163 ; Marq. Privatlehen, p. 87 foil. Confarreatio 
was only dissoluble by diffarreatio, but this was perhaps used only for penal 
purposes. Other forms of marriage did not present the same difficulty, not 
being of a sacramental character. 

* Plutarch, Aem. Paull. 5. 



148 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

years together, and in innumerable cases must have 

perished by the sword or pestilence, or fallen into 

the hands of an enemy and been enslaved. It was 

inevitable that as the male population diminished, as 

it undoubtedly did in that century, the importance 

of woman should proportionately have increased. 

Unfortunately too, even when the husbands were at 

home, their wives sometimes seem to have wished 

to be rid of them. In 180 B.C. the consul Piso was 

believed to have been murdered by his wife, and 

whether the story be true or not, the suspicion is at 

least significant.^ In 154 two noble ladies, wives of 

consulares, were accused of poisoning their husbands 

and put to death by a council of their own relations.^ 

Though the evidence in these cases is not by any 

means satisfactory, yet we can hardly doubt that 

' there was a tendency among women of the highest 

rank to give way to passion and excitement ; the 

evidence for the Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 B.C., 

in which women played a very prominent part, is 

explicit, and shows that there was a " new woman " 

even then, who had ceased to be satisfied with 

the austere life of the family and with the mental 

comfort supplied by the old religion, and was ready 

to break out into recklessness even in matters which 

were the concern of the State. ^ That they had 

already begun to exercise an undue influence over 

their husbands in public affairs seems suggested by 

old Cato's famous dictum that " all men rule over 

1 Livy xl. 37. ^ Livy, Epit. 48. ^ Livy xxxix. 8-18. 



V MARRIAGE 149 

women, we Romans rule over all men, and our 
wives rule over us."^ 

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that 
the men themselves were not equally to blame. 
Wives do not poison their husbands without some 
reason for hating them, and the reason is not difficult 
to guess. It is a fact beyond doubt that in spite of 
the charm of family life as it has been described 
above, neither law nor custom exacted conjugal 
faithfulness from a husband.^ Old Cato represents 
fairly well the old idea of Roman virtue, yet it is 
clear enough, both from Plutarch's Life of him (e.g. 
ch. xxiv.) and from fragments of his own writings, 
that his view of the conjugal relation was a coarse one, 
— that he looked on the wife rather as a necessary 
agent for providing the State with children than as 
a helpmeet to be tended and revered. And this 
being so, we are not surprised to find that men 
are abeady beginning to dislike and avoid marriage ; 
a most dangerous symptom, with which a century 
later Augustus found it impossible to cope. In the 
year 131, just after Tiberius Gracchus had been 
trying to revive the population of Italy by his 
agrarian law, Metellus Macedonicus the censor did 

1 Plutarch, Cato the Elder 8. 

2 Gellius (x. 23) quotes a fragment of Cato's speech de Dotibus, in 
which the following sentences occur: "Si quid perverse taetreque factum 
est a muliere, multitatur : si vinum bibit, si cum alieno viro probri quid 
fecerit, condempnatur. In adulterio uxorem tuam si prehendisses sine 
iudicio impune necares : ilia te, si adulterares sive tu adulterarere, digito 
non auderet contingere, neque ins est." Under such circumstances a bold 
woman might take her revenge illegally. 



I50 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

what he could to induce men to marry "liberorum 
creandorum causa " ; and a fragment of a speech of 
his on this subject became famous afterwards, as 
quoted by Augustus with the same object. It is 
equally characteristic of Roman humour and Roman 
hardness. " If we could do without wives," he said 
to the people, " we should be rid of that nuisance : 
but since nature has decreed that we can neither live 
comfortably with them nor live at all without them, 
we must e'en look rather to our permanent interests 
than to a passing pleasure." ^ 

I Now if we take into account these tendencies, on 
the part both of men and women in the married 
state, and further consider the stormy and revolu- 
tionary character of the half century that succeeded 
the Gracchi, — the Social and Civil Wars, the proscrip- 
tions of Marius and Sulla, — we shall be prepared to 
find the ladies of Cicero's time by no means simply 
feminine in charm or homely in disposition. Most 
of them are indeed mere names to us, and we have 
to be careful in weighing what is said of them by 
later writers. But of two or three of them we do in 
fact know a good deal. 

The one of whom we really know most is the wife 
of Cicero, Terentia : an ordinary lady, of no particular 
abihty or interest, who may stand as representative 
of the quieter type of married woman. She lived 
with her husband about thirty years, and until 
towards the end of that period, a long one for the age, 

^ Gellius i. 6 ; cp, Livy, Epit. 59. 



V MARRIAGE 151 

we find nothing substantial against her. If we had 
nothing but Cicero's letters to her, more than twenty 
in number, and his allusions to her in other letters, we 
should conclude that she was a faithful and on the 
whole a sensible wife. But more than once he writes 
of her delicate health,^ and as the poor lady had at 
various times a great deal of trouble to go through, 
it is quite possible that as she grew older she became 
short in her temper, or trying in other ways to a 
husband so excitable and vacillating. We find stories 
of her in Plutarch and elsewhere which represent her 
as shrewish, too careful of her own money, and so 
on ; ^ but facts are of more account than the gossip of 
the day, and there is not a sign in the letters that 
Cicero disliked or mistrusted her until the year 47. 
Had there really been cause for mistrust it would 
have slipped out in some letter to Atticus. Then, 
after his absence during the war, he seems to have 
believed that she had neglected himself and his 
interests: his letters to her grow colder and colder,' 
and the last is one which, as has been truly said, a 
gentleman would not write to his housekeeper. The 
pity of it is that Cicero, after divorcing her, married 
a young and rich wife, and does not seem to have 
behaved very well to her. In a letter to Atticus 

^ e.g. ad Fam. xiv. 2. 

2 The story of the relations of Cicero, Terentia, Clodius, and Clodia, in 
Pint. Cic. 29 is too full of inaccuracies to be depended on. In the 41st 
chapter what he says of the divorce and its causes must be received with 
caution ; it seems to come from some record left by Tiro, Cicero's freedman 
and devoted friend, and as Cicero obviously loved this man much more than 
his wife, we can understand why the two should dislike each other. 



152 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

(xii. 32) he writes that Publilia wanted to come 
to him with her mother, when he was at Astura, 
devoting himself to grief for his daughter, and that 
he had answered that he wished to be let alone. The 
letter shows Cicero at his worst, for once heartless 
and discourteous ; and if he could be so to a young 
lady who wished to do her duty by him, what may 
he not have been to Terentia ? I suspect that 
Terentia was quite as much sinned against as sinning ; 
and may we not believe that of the innumerable 
married women who were divorced at this time some 
at least were the victims of their husbands' callous- 
ness rather than of their own shortcomings ? 

The wife of Cicero's brother Quintus does, however, 
seem to have been a difficult person to get on with. 
She was a sister of Atticus, but she did not share her 
brother's tact and universal good- will. Marcus Cicero 
has recorded {ad Att. v. 1) a scene in which her ill- 
temper was so ludicrous that the divorce which took 
place afterwards needs no explanation. The two 
brothers were travelling together, and Pomponia was 
with them ; something had irritated her. When they 
stopped to lunch at a place belonging to Quintus at 
Arcanum, he asked his wife to invite the ladies of the 
party in. " Nothing, as I thought, could be more cour- 
teous, and that too not only in the actual words, but 
in his intention and the expression of his face. But 
she, in the hearing of us all, exclaimed, ' I am only a 
stranger here ! ' " Apparently she had not been asked 
by her husband to see after the luncheon ; this had 



V MARRIAGE 153 

been done by a freedman, and she was annoyed. 
" Tbere," said Quintus, " that is what I have to put up 
with every day ! " When he sent her dishes from the 
triclinium, where the gentlemen were having their 
meal, she would not taste them. This little domestic 
contretemps is too good to be neglected, but we 
must turn to women of greater note and character. 

Terentia and Pomponia and their kind seem to 
have had nothing in the way of *' higher education," 
nor do their husbands seem to have expected from them 
any desire to share in their own intellectual interests. 
Not once does Cicero allude to any pleasant social 
intercourse in which his wife took part ; and, to say 
the truth, he would probably have avoided marriage 
with a woman of taste and knowledge. There were 
such women, as we shall see, probably many of 
them ; ever since the incoming of wealth and of 
Greek education, of theatres and amusements and all 
the pleasant out-of-door life of the city, what was 
now coming to be called cultus had occupied the 
minds and affected the habits of Roman ladies as well 
as men. Unfortunately it was seldom that it was 
found compatible with the old Roman ideal of the 
materfamilias and her duties. The invasion of new 
manners was too sudden, as was the corresponding 
invasion of wealth ; such a lady as Cornelia, the 
famous mother of the Gracchi, who knew what 
education really meant, who had learned men about 
her and could write well herself, and yet could 
combine with these qualities the careful discharge of 



154 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

tlie duties of wife and mother,^ — such ladies must 
have been rare, and in Cicero's time hardly to be 
found. More and more the notion gained ground 
that a clever woman who wished to make a figure in 
society, to be the centre of her own monde, could not 
well realise her ambition simply as a married woman. 
She would probably marry, play fast and loose with 
the married state, neglect her children if she had any, 
and after one or two divorces, die or disappear. So 
powerfully did this idea of the incompatibility of 
culture and wifehood gain possession of the Roman 
mind in the last century B.C., that Augustus found 
his struggle with it the most difficult task he had to 
face ; in vain he exiled Ovid for publishing a work in 
which married women are most frankly and explicitly 
left out of account, while all that is attractive in the 
other sex to a man of taste and education is assumed 
to be found only among those who have, so far at 
least, eschewed the duties and burdens of married 
life. The culta puella and the cultus puer of Ovid's 
fascinating yet repulsive poem ^ are the products of a 
society which looks on pleasure, not reason or duty, 
as the main end of life, — not indeed pleasure simply 
of the grosser type, but the gratification of one's 
own wish for enjoyment and excitement, without a 
thought of the misery all around, or any sense of the 
self-respect that comes of active well-doing. 

^ Plutarcli, Ti. Gfracch. 1 ; Gains Gracch. 19. The letters of Cornelia 
which are extant are quite possibly genuine. 

^ The recent edition of the Ars amatoria by Paul Brandt has an intro- 
duction in which these points are well expressed. 



V MARRIAGE 155 

The most notable example of a woman of cultus 
in Cicero's day was the famous Clodia, the Lesbia (as 
we may now almost assume) who fascinated Catullus 
and then threw him over. She had been married to 
a man of family and high station, Metellus Celer, who 
had died, strange to say, without divorcing her. She 
must have been a woman of great beauty and charm, 
for she seems to have attracted round her a little 
c6terie of clever young men and poets, to whom she 
could lend money or accord praise as suited the 
moment. Whether Cicero himself had once come 
within reach of her attractions, and perhaps suffered 
by them, is an open question, and depends chiefly on 
statements of Plutarch which may (as has been said 
above) have no better foundation than the gossip of 
society. But we know how two typical young men 
of the time, Caelius and Catullus, flew into the candle 
and were singed; we know how fiercely she turned 
on Caelius, exposing herself and him without a 
moment's hesitation in a public court ; and we know 
how cruelly she treated the poet, who hated her for it 
even while he still loved her : ^ 

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris ; 
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. 

Catull. 85. 

She was, as M. Boissier has well said,^ the exact 
counterpart of her still more famous brother : " Elle 
apportait dans sa conduite privee, dans ses engage- 
ments d'affection, les memes emportements et les 

: ^ Catullus 72. 75. '^ Oie^ron et ses amis, p. 175. 



156 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

memes ardeurs que son frere dans la vie publique. 
Prompte a tons les exces et ne rougissant pas de les 
avouer, aimant efc haissant avec fureur, incapable de 
se gouverner et d6testant toute contrainte, elle ne 
d^mentait pas cette grande et fiere famille dont elle 
descendait." All this is true ; we need not go beyond 
it and believe the worst that has been said of her. 

We have just a glimpse of another lady of cultus, 
but only a glimpse. This was Sempronia, the wife 
of an honest man and the mother of another ; ^ but 
according to Sallust, who introduces her to us as 
a principal in the conspiracy of Catiline, she was 
one of those who found steady married life incom- 
patible with literary and artistic tastes. " She could 
play and dance more elegantly than an honest woman 
should . . . she played fast and loose with her money, 
and equally so with her good fame."^ She had no 
scruples, he says, in denying a debt, or in helping in 
a murder : yet she had plenty of esprit, could* write 
verses and talk brilliantly, and she knew too how to 
assume an air of modesty on occasion. Sallust loved 
to colour his portraits highly, and in painting this 
woman he saw no doubt a chance of literary effect ; 
but that she was really in the conspiracy we cannot 
doubt, and that she had private ends to gain by it 
is also probable. She seems to be the first of a series 
of ladies who during the next century and later were 
to be a power in politics, and most of whom were at 

* Decimus Brutus, one of the tyrannicides of March 15, 44. 
2 Sail. Cat. 25. 



V MARRIAGE 157 

least capable of crime, public and private. There is 
indeed one instance a few years earlier of a woman 
exercising an almost supreme influence in tbe State, 
and a woman too of the worst kind. Plutarch tells 
us in the most explicit way that when Lucullus in 
75 B.C. was trying to secure for himself the command 
against Mithridates, he found himself compelled to 
apply to a woman named Praecia, whose social gifts 
and good nature gave her immense influence, which 
she used with the pertinacity peculiar to such ladies. 
Her reputation, however, was very bad, and among 
other lovers she had enslaved Cethegus (afterwards 
the conspirator), whose power at the time was immense 
at Rome. Thus, says Plutarch, the whole power of 
the State fell into the hands of Praecia, for no public 
measure was passed if Cethegus was not for it, in 
other words, if Praecia did not recommend it to him. 
If the story be true, as it seems to be, Lucullus gained 
her over by gifts and flattery, and thus Cethegus 
took up his cause and got him the command.^ 

Even if we put aside as untrustworthy a great 
deal of what is told us of the relations of men and 
women in this period, it must be confessed that there 
is quite sufficient evidence to show that they were 
loose in the extreme, and show an altogether un- 
healthy condition of family and social life. The 
famous tigress of the story of Cluentius, Sassia, as 
she appears in Cicero's defence of him, was beyond 
doubt a criminal of the worst kind, however much 

^ Plut. Lucullus 6. 



158 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

we may discount the orator's rhetoric ; and her case 
proves that the evil did not exist only at Eome, but 
was to be found even in a provincial town of no great 
importance. Divorce was so common as to be almost 
inevitable. Husbands divorced their wives on the 
smallest pretexts, and wives divorced their husbands.^ 
Even the virtuous Cato seems to have divorced his 
wife Marcia in order that Hortensius should marry 
her, and after some years to have married her again 
as the widow of Hortensius, with a large fortune.^ 
Cicero himself writes sometimes in the lightest- 
hearted way of conjugal relations which we should 
think most serious ; ^ and we find him telling Atticus 
how he had met at dinner the actress Cytheris, a 
woman of notoriously bad character. " I did not 
know she was going to be there," he says, " but even 
the Socratic Aristippus himself did not blush when 
he was taunted about Lais." ^ Caesar's reputation in 
such matters was at all times bad, and though many 
of the stories about him are manifestly false, his 
conquest by Cleopatra was a fact, and we learn with 
regret that the Egyptian queen was living in a villa 
of his in gardens beyond the Tiber during the year 
46, when he was himself in Rome. 

It will be a relief to the reader, after spending so 

^ Cic. ad Fam. viii. 7 : a letter of Caelius, in wliicli he tells of a lady 
who divorced her husband without pretext on the very day he returned from 
his province. 

^ Plut. Cato min. 25 and 52. Plutarch seems to be using here the Auti- 
Cato of Caesar, but the facts must have been well known. 

* e.g. ad Att. XV. 29. * ad Fam, ix. 26. 



V MARRIAGE 159 

mucli time in this unwholesome atmosphere, to turn 
for a moment in the last place to a record, unique 
and entirely credible, of a truly good and wholesome 
woman, and of a long period of uninterrupted conjugal 
devotion. About the year 8 B.C., not long before Ovid 
wrote those poems in which married life was assumed 
to be hardly worth living, a husband in high life 
at Rome lost the wife who had for forty -one years 
been his faithful companion in prosperity, his wise 
and courageous counsellor iu adversity. He recorded 
her praises and the story of her devotion to him in 
a long inscription, placed, as we may suppose, on the 
wall of the tomb in which he laid her to rest, and 
a most fortunate chance has preserved for us a great 
part of the marble on which this inscription was 
engraved. It is in the form of a laudatio, or funeral 
encomium ; yet we cannot feel sure that he actually 
delivered it as a speech, for throughout it he addresses, 
not an audience, but the lost wife herself, in a manner 
unique among such documents of the kind as have 
come down to us. He speaks to her as though she 
were still living, though passed from his sight ; and 
it is just this that makes it more real and more 
touching than any memorial of the dead that has 
come down to us from either Italy or Greece.^ 

* The so-called Laudatio Turiae is well known to all students of Roman 
law, as raising a complicated question of Roman legal inheritance ; but it 
may also be reckoned as a real fragment of Roman literature, valuable, too, 
for some points in the history of the time it covers. It was first made 
accessible and intelligible by Mommsen in 1863, and the paper he then wrote 
about it has lately been reprinted in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. i., 



sj 



i6o SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

In such a record names are of no great importance; 
it is no great misfortune that we do not know quite 
for certain who this man and his wife were. But 
there is a very strong probability that her name was 
Turia, and that he was a certain Q. Lucretius Vespillo, 
who served under Pompeius in Epirus in 48 B.C., 
whose romantic adventures in the proscriptions of 43 
are recorded by A^gpian/ and who eventually became 
consul under Augustus in 19 B.C. We may venture 
to use these names in telling the remarkable story. 
For telling it here no apology is needed, for it has 
never been told in English as a whole, so far as I am 
aware. 

It begins when the pair were about to be married, 
probably in 49 B.C., and with a horrible family 
calamity, not unnatural at the moment of the out- 
break of a dangerous civil war. Both Turia's parents 
were murdered suddenly and together at their country 
residence — perhaps, as Mommsen suggested, by their 
own slaves. Immediately afterwards Lucretius had 
to leave with Pompeius' army for Epirus, and Turia 
was left alone, bereft of both her parents, to do what 
she could to secure the punishment of the murderers. 
Alone as she was, or aided only by a married sister, 
she at once showed the courage and energy which are 

together with a new fragment discovered on the same site as the others in 
1898. This fragment, and a discussion of its relation to the whole, will be 
found in the Classical Review for June 1905, p. 261 ; the laudatio without 
the new fragment in C.I.L. vi. 1527. 

^ App. B. C. iv. 44. The identification has been impugned of late, but, as 
I think, without due reason. See my article in Classical Sev., 1905, p. 265. 



V MARRIAGE i6i 

obvious in all we liear of her. She seems to have 
succeeded in tracking the assassins and bringing 
them to justice : " even if I had been there myself," 
says her husband, " I could have done no more." 

But this was by no means the only dangerous 
task she had to undertake in those years of civil war 
and insecurity. When Lucretius left her they seem 
to have been staying at the villa where her parents 
had been murdered ; she had given him all her gold 
and pearls, and kept him supplied in his absence 
with money, provisions, and even slaves, which she 
contrived to smuggle over sea to Epirus.^ And during 
the march of Caesar's army through Italy she seems 
to have been threatened, either in that villa or another, 
by some detachment of his troops, and to have 
escaped only through her own courage and the 
clemency of one whose name is not mentioned, but 
who can hardly be other than the great Julius him- 
self, a true gentleman, whose instinct and policy 
alike it was throughout this civil war to be merciful 
to opponents. 

A year later, while Lucretius was still away, yet 
another peril came upon her. While Caesar was 
operating round Dyrrhachium, there was a dangerous 
rising in Campania and Southern Italy, for which our 
giddy friend Caelius Rufus was chiefly responsible ; 
gladiators and ruffianly shepherd slaves were enlisted, 
and by some of these the villa where she was staying 

1 This is how I interpret the new fragment. See Classical Eev. I.e. 
p. 263 foil. 

M 



i62 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

was attacked, and successfully defended by her, — so 
much at least it seems possible to infer from the 
fragment recently discovered. 

One might think that Turia had already had 
her full share of trouble and danger, but there is 
much more to come. About this time she had to 
defend herself against another attack, not indeed on 
her person, but on her rights as an heiress. An 
attempt was made by her relations to upset her 
father's will, under which she and Lucretius were 
appointed equal inheritors of his property. The 
result of this would have been to make her the sole 
heiress, leaving out her husband and her married 
sister ; but she would have been under the legal 
tutela or guardianship of persons whose motive in 
attacking; the will was to obtain administration of the 
property.^ No doubt they meant to administer it 
for their own advantage; and it was absolutely 
necessary that she should resist them. How she did 
it her husband does not tell us, but he says that the 
enemy retreated from his position, yielding to her 
firmness and perseverance (constantia). The patri- 
monium came, as her father had intended, to herself 
and her husband ; and he dwells on the care with 
which they dealt with it, he exercising a tutela over 
her share, while she exercised a custodia over his. 
Very touchingly he adds, " but of this I leave much 
unsaid, lest I should seem to be claiming a share in 
the praise that is due to you alone." 

* For the legal question see Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, i. p. 407 folL 



V MARRIAGE 163 

When Lucretius returned to Italy, apparently 
pardoned by Caesar for the part he had taken against 
him, the marriage must have been consummated. 
Then came the murder of the Dictator, which 
plunged Italy once more into civil war, until in 43 
Antony Octavian and Lepidus made their famous 
compact, and at once proceeded to that abominable 
work of proscription which made a reign of terror at 
Rome, and spilt much of the best Roman blood. The 
happiness of the pair was suddenly destroyed, for 
Lucretius found himself named in the fatal lists. ^ He 
seems to have been in the country, not far from Rome, 
when he received a message from his wife, telling 
him of impending peril that he might have to face 
at any moment, and warning him strongly against 
a certain rash course — perhaps an attempt to escape 
to Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, a course which cost 
the lives of many deluded victims. She implored 
him to return to their own house in Rome, where 
she had devised a secure hiding-place for him. She 
meant no doubt to die with him there if he were 
discovered. 

He obeyed his good genius and made for Rome, 
by night it would seem, with only two faithful slaves. 
One of these fell lame and had to be left behind; 
and Lucretius, leaning on the arm of the other, 
approached the city gate. Suddenly they became 

^ The account that follows is put together from Appian iv. 44, Valerius 
Maximus vi. 7. 2, and the Laudatio. Appian preserved some fifty stories of 
escapes at this time, and the only one that fits with the Laudatio is that of 
Lucretius. 



i64 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

aware of a troop of soldiers issuing from it, and 
Lucretius took refuge in one of the many tombs 
that lined the great roads outside the walls. They 
had not been long in this dismal hiding when they 
were surprised by a party of tomb-wreckers — ghouls 
who haunted these roads by night and lived by 
robbing tombs or travellers. Luckily they wanted 
rather to rob than to murder, and the slave gave 
himself up to them to be stripped, while his master, 
who was no doubt disguised, perhaps as a slave, 
contrived to slip out of their hands and reached the 
city gate safely. Here he waited, as we might expect 
him to do, for his brave companion, and then 
succeeded in making his way into the city and to 
his house, where his wife concealed him between the 
roof and the ceiling of one of their bedrooms, until 
the storm should blow over. 

But neither life nor property was safe until some 
pardon and restitution were obtained from one at 
least of the triumvirs. When at last these were 
conceded by Oct avian, he was himself absent in the 
campaign that ended with Philippi, and Lepidus was 
consul in charge of Rome. To Lepidus Turia had 
to go, to beg the confirmation of Octavian's grace, 
and this brutal man received her with insult and 
injury. She fell at his feet, as her husband describes 
with bitter indignation, but instead of being raised 
and congratulated, she was hustled, beaten like a 
slave, and driven from his presence. But her per- 
severance had its ultimate reward. The clemency 



V MARRIAGE 165 

of Octavian prevailed on his return to Italy, and this 
treatment of a lady was among the many crimes that 
called for the eventual degradation of Lepidus. 

This was the last of their perilous escapes. A 
long period of happy married life awaited them, more 
particularly after the battle of Actium, when " peace 
and the republic were restored." One thing only 
was wanting to complete their perfect felicity — they 
had no children. It was this that caused Turia to 
make a proposal to her husband which, coming from 
a truly unselfish woman, and seen in the light of 
Roman ideas of married life, is far from unnatural ; 
but to us it must seem astonishing, and it filled 
Lucretius with horror. She urged that he should 
divorce her, and take another wife in the hope of a 
son and heir. If there is nothing very surprising in 
this from a Roman point of view, it is indeed to us 
both surprising and touching that she should have 
supported her request by a promise that she would 
be as much a mother to the expected children as 
their own mother, and would still be to Lucretius 
a sister, having nothing apart from him, nothing 
secret, and taking away with her no part of their 
inheritance. 

To us, reading this proposal in cold blood just 
nineteen hundred years after it was made, it may 
seem foolishly impracticable ; to her, whose whole 
life was spent in unselfish devotion to her husband's 
interests, whose warm love for him was always 
mingled with discretion, it was simply an act of 



i66 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

pietas — of wifely duty. Yet he could not for a 
moment think so himself : his indignation at the bare 
idea of it lives for ever on the marble in glowing 
words. " I must confess," he says, " that the anger 
so burnt within me that my senses almost deserted 
me : that you should ever have thought it possible 
that we could be separated but by death, was most 
horrible to me. What was the need of children 
compared with my loyalty to you : why should I 
exchange certain happiness for an uncertain future ? 
But I say no more of this : you remained with me, 
for I could not yield without disgrace to myself and 
unhappiness to both of us. The one sorrow that 
was in store for me was that I was destined to 
survive you." 

These two, we may feel sure, were wholly worthy 
of each other. What she would have said of him, if 
he had been the first to go, we can only guess ; but 
he has left a portrait of her, as she lived and worked 
in his household, which, mutilated though it is, may 
be inadequately paraphrased as follows : 

*' You were a faithful wife to me," he says, " and 
an obedient one : you were kind and gracious, sociable 
and friendly : you were assiduous at your spinning 
(lanificia) : you followed the religious rites of your 
family and your state, and admitted no foreign cults 
or degraded magic (superstitio) : you did not dress 
conspicuously, nor seek to make a display in your 
household arrangements. Your duty to our whole 
household was exemplary : you tended my mother 



V MARRIAGE 167 

as carefully as if she had been your own. You had 
innumerable other excellences, in common with all 
other worthy matrons, but these I have mentioned 
were peculiarly yours." 

No one can study this inscription without becom- 
ing convinced that it tells an unvarnished tale of 
truth — that here was really a rare and precious 
woman ; a Roman matron of the very best type, 
practical, judicious, courageous, simple in her habits 
and courteous to all her guests. And we feel that 
there is one human being, and one only, of whom 
she is always thinking, to whom she has given her 
whole heart — the husband whose words and deeds 
show that he was wholly worthy of her. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE EDUCATION OF THE UPPER CLASSES 

From what has been said in preceding chapters of 
the duties and the habits of the two sections of the 
upper stratum of society, it will readily be inferred 
that the kind of education called for was one mainly 
of character. In these men, whether for the work 
of business or of government, what was wanted was 
the will to do well and justly, and the instinctive 
hatred of all evil and unjust dealing. Such an 
education of the will and character is supplied (what- 
ever be its shortcomings in other ways) by our 
English public school education, for men whose work 
in life is in many ways singularly like that of the 
Roman upper classes. Such an education, too, was 
outlined by Aristotle for the men of his ideal state ; 
and Mr. Newman's picture of the probable results 
of it is so suggestive of what was really needed at 
Rome that I may quote it here.^ 

"As its outcome at the age of twenty -one we 
may imagine a bronzed and hardy youth, healthy 
in body and mind, able to bear hunger and hard 

^ Newman, Politics of Aristotle, i. p. 372. 
168 



CH.VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSED 169 

physical labour . . . not untouched by studies whicb 
awake in men the interest of civilised beings, and 
prepare them for the right use of leisure in future 
years, and though burdened with little knowledge, 
possessed of an educated sense of beauty, and an 
ingrained love of what is noble and hatred of all 
that is the reverse. He would be more cultivated 
and human than the best type of young Spartan, 
more physically vigorous and reverential, though 
less intellectually developed, than the best type of 
young Athenian — a nascent soldier and servant of 
the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, 
a nascent orator. And as he would be only half 
way through his education at an age when many 
Greeks had finished theirs, he would be more 
conscious of his own immaturity. We feel at once 
how different he would be from the clever lads who 
swarmed at Athens, youths with an infinite capacity 
for picking holes, and capable of saying something 
plausible on every subject under the sun." 

If we note, with Mr. Newman, that Aristotle here 
makes if anything too little of intellectual training 
(as indeed may also be said of our own public 
schools), and add to his picture something more of 
that knowledge which, when united with an honest 
will and healthy body, will almost infallibly produce 
a sound judgment, we shall have a type of character 
eminently fitted to share in the duties and the trials 
of the government of such empires as the Roman 
and the British. But at Rome, in the age of Cicero, 



I70 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

such a type of character was rare indeed ; and though 
this was due to various causes, some of which have 
been already noticed, — the building up of a Roman 
empire before the Romans were ripe to appreciate 
the duties of an imperial state, and the sudden 
incoming of wealth in an age when the idea of its 
productive use was almost unknown, — yet it will occur 
to every reader that there must have been also 
something wrong in the upbringing of the youth of 
the upper classes to account for the rarity of really 
sound character, for the frequent absence of what 
we should call the sense of duty, public and private. 
I propose in this chapter to deal with the question 
of Roman education just so far as to show where in 
Cicero's time it was chiefly defective. It is a subject 
that has been very completely worked out, and an 
excellent summary of the results will be found in 
the Httle volume on Roman education written by 
the late Professor A. S. Wilkins, just before his 
lamented death : but he was describing its methods 
without special reference to its defects, and it is 
these defects on which I wish more particularly to 
dwell.^ 

Let us notice, in the first place, how little is said 
in the literature of the time, including biographies, 

^ A list of the best authorities will be found at the beginning of Professor 
Wilkins' book. Of these by far the most useful for a student is the 
section in Marquardt's Privatlehen, p. 79 foil. The two volumes of Cramer 
(Gesehichte der Erziehung, etc.), which cover all antiquity, are, as he says, 
most valuable for their breadth of view. See also H. Nettleship, Lectures 
and Essays, ch. iii. foil. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 171 

of that period of life which is now so full of interest 
to readers of memoirs, so full of interest to ourselves 
as we look back to it in advancing years. It may- 
be that we now exaggerate the importance of child- 
hood, but it is equally certain that the Eomans 
undervalued the importance of it. It may be that 
we over-estimate the value of our public-school life, 
but it is certain that the Romans had no such school 
life to be proud of Biography was at this time a 
favourite form of literature, and some of the memoirs 
then written were available for use by later writers, 
such as Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, and Plutarch ; 
yet it is curious how little has come down to us of 
the childhood or boyhood of the great men of the 
time. Plutarch indeed was deeply interested in 
education, including that of childhood, and we can 
hardly doubt that he would have used in his Roman 
Lives any information that came in his way. He 
does tell us something, for which we are eternally 
indebted to him, of old Cato's method of educating 
his son,^ and something too, in his Life of Aemilius 
Paullus,^ of the education of the eldest son of that 
family, the great Scipio Aemilianus. But in each 
of these Lives we shall find that this information is 
used rather to bring out the character of the father 
than to illustrate the up-bringing of the son ; and as 
a rule the Lives begin with the parentage of the hero, 
and then pass on at once to his early manhood. 

The Life of the younger Cato, however, is an 

^ Plut. Cato the Elder, ch. xx. ^ Plut. Aem. Paul. ch. vi. 



172 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

exception to tlie rule, whicli we must ascribe to the 
attraction which all historians and philosophers felt 
to this singular character. Plutarch knew the name 
and character of Cato's paedagogus, Sarpedon,^ and 
tells us that he was an obedient child, but would 
ask for the reason of everything, in those questions 
beginning with " why " which are often embarrassing 
to the teacher. Two stories in the second and third 
chapters of this Life are also found in that insipid 
medley of fact and fable drawn up in the reign of 
Tiberius, by Valerius Maximus, for educational pur- 
poses ; ^ a third, which is peculiarly significant, and 
seems to bear the stamp of truth, is only to be found 
in Plutarch. I give it here in full : 

" On another occasion, when a kinsman on his 
birthday invited some boys to supper and Cato 
with them, in order to pass the time they played in a 
part of the house by themselves, younger and older 
together : and the game consisted of accusations and 
trials, and the arresting of those who were convicted. 
Now one of the boys convicted, who was of a hand- 
some presence, being dragged ofi" by an older boy to 
a chamber and shut up, called on Cato for aid. Cato 
seeing what was going on came to the door, and 
pushing through those who were posted in front of 
it to prevent him, took the boy out ; and went off 

^ Plut. Cato minor 1 ad fin. What is told in the earlier part of this 
chapter may perhaps be invention, based on the character of the grown 
man ; but this information at the end may be derived from a contem- 
porary source. 

2 Val. Max. iii. 1. 2. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 173 

home with him in a passion, accompanied by other 
boys." 

This is a unique picture of the ways and games of 
boys in the last century of the Eepublic. Like the 
children of all times, they play at that in which they 
see their fathers most active and interested ; and this 
particular game must have been played in the miser- 
able years of the civil wars and the proscriptions, as 
Cato was born in 95 B.C. Whether the part played 
by Cato in the story be true or not, the lesson for us 
is the same, and we shall find it entirely confirmed 
in the course of this chapter. The main object of 
education was the mastery of the art of oratory, and 
the chief practical use of that art was to enable a 
man to gain a reputation as an advocate in the 
criminal courts.^ 

Cicero had one boy, and for several years two, to 
look after, one his own son Marcus, born in 65 B.C., 
and the other Quintus, the son of his brother, a year 
older. Of these boys, until they took the toga virilis, 
he says hardly anything in his letters to Atticus, 
though Atticus was the uncle of the elder boy. Only 
when his brother Quintus was with Caesar in Gaul 
do we really begin to hear anything about them, and 
even then more than once, after a brief mention of 
the young Quintus, he goes off at once to tell his 
brother about the progress of the villas that are being 

^ There is a single story of Cicero's boyhood in Plutarch's Life of him, 
ch. ii., that parents used to visit his school because of his fame as a scholar, 
etc., but to this I do not attach much importance. 



174 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

built for him. But it is clear that the father wished 
to know about the boy as well as about the villas ; ^ 
and in one letter we find Cicero telling Quintus that 
he wishes to teach his boy himself, as he has been 
teaching his own son. " I'll do wonders with him if 
I can get him to myself when I am at leisure, for 
at Eome there is not time to breathe (nam Romae 
respirandi non est locus)," ^ It is clear that the 
boys, who were only eleven and twelve in this year 
54, were being educated at home, and as clear too 
that Cicero, who was just then very much occupied 
in the courts, had no time to attend to them himself 
Young Quintus, we hear, gets on well with his 
rhetoric master ; Cicero does not wholly approve the 
style in which he is being taught, and thinks he may 
be able to teach him his own more learned style, 
though the boy himself seems to prefer the declama- 
tory method of the teacher.^ The last entry in these 
letters to the absent father is curious : * "I love your 
Cicero as he deserves and as I ought. But I am 
letting him leave me, because I don't want to keep 
him from his masters, and because his mother is 
going away, — and without her I am nervous about 
his greediness ! " Up to this point he has written 
in the warmest terms of the boy, but here, as so 
often in Cicero's letters about other people, disappro- 
bation is barely hinted in order not to hurt the 
feelings of his correspondent. 

^ So in ofi Q.F. iii. 1. 7 : de Cicerone tuo quod me semper rogas, etc. 
2 iJ. 8 jTi. iii. 3. 4. 4 jj^ iii. 9. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 175 

The one thing that is really pleasing in these 
allusions is the genuine desire of both parents that 
their boys shall be of good disposition and well 
educated. But of real training or of home discipline 
we unluckily get no hint. We must go elsewhere for 
what little we know about the training of children. 
Let us now turn to this for a while, remembering 
that it means parental example and the discipline of 
the body as well as the acquisition of elementary 
knowledge. Unfortunately, no book has survived 
from that age in which the education of children 
was treated of Varro wrote such a book, but we 
know of it little more than its name, Catus, sive de 
liberis educandis} In the fourth book of his de 
Repuhlica Cicero seems to have dealt with "disci- 
plina puerilis," but from the few fragments that 
survive there is little to be learnt, and we may be 
pretty sure that Cicero could not write of this with 
much knowledge or experience. The most famous 
passage is that in which he quotes Polybius as 
blaming the Komans for neglecting it;^ certainly, 
he adds, they never wished that the State should 
regulate the education of children, or that it should 
be all on one model ; the Creeks took much unneces- 
sary trouble about it. The Greeks of his own time 
whom Cicero knew did not inspire him with any 
exalted idea of the results of Greek education ; but 
we should like to know whether in this book of his 

^ See the few fragments in the Appendix to Riese's edition of the remains 
of Varro's Menippean Satires, p. 248 foil. ^ De Sep. iv. 3. 3. 



176 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

work on the State he did not express some feeling 
that on the children themselves, and therefore on 
their training, the fortunes of the State depend. 
Such had been the feeling of the old Romans, though 
their State laid down no laws for education, but 
trusted to the force of tradition and custom. Old 
Cato believed himself to be acting like an old Roman 
when he looked after the washing and dressing of his 
baby, and guided the child with personal care as he 
grew up, writing books for his use in large letters 
with his own hand.^ But since Cato's day the idea 
of the State had lost strength; and this had an 
unfortunate effect on education, as on married life. 
The one hope of the age, the Stoic philosophy, was 
concerned with those who had attained to reason, 
i.e. to those who had reached their fourteenth year ; 
in the Stoic view the child was indeed potentially 
reasonable, and thus a subject of interest, but in 
the Stoic ethics education does not take a very 
prominent place, ^ We are driven to the conclusion 
that a real interest in education as distinct from 
the acquisition of knowledge was as much wanting 
at Rome in Cicero's day as it has been till lately 
in England ; and that it was not again awakened 
until Christianity had made the children sacred, not 
only because the Master so spoke of them, but 
because they were inheritors of eternal life. 

1 Plut. Cato 20. 

^ There is probably an allusion to tbe Stoic view, that reason is not 
attained till the fourteenth year, in Virgil's line in Ed. 4. 27. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 177 

Yet there had once been a Roman home education 
admirably suited to bring up a race of hardy and 
dutiful men and women. It was an education in 
the family virtues, thereafter to be turned to account 
in the service of the State. The mother nursed her 
own children and tended them in their earliest years. 
Then followed an education which we may call onei^ 
in bodily activity, in demeanour, in religion, and in 
duty to the State. It is true that we have hardly 
any evidence of this but tradition ; but when Varro, 
in one of the precious fragments of his book on 
education, describes his own bringing up in his 
Sabine home at Reate, we may be fairly sure that it 
adequately represents that of the old Roman farmer.^ 
He tells us that he had a single tunic and toga, was 
seldom allowed a bath, and was made to learn to ride 
bareback — which reminds us of the life of the young 
Boer of the Transvaal before the late war. In another 
fragment he also tells us that both boys and girls 
used to wait on their parents at table. ^ Cato the 
elder, in a fragment preserved by Festus,^ says that 
he was brought up from his earliest years to be 
frugal, hardy, and industrious, and worked steadily 
on the farm (in the Sabine country), in a stony 
region where he had to dig and plant the flinty soil. 
The tradition of such a healthy rearing remained in 
the memory of the Romans, and associated itself with 

^ in Nonius, p. 108, s.v. ephippium. Cp. the account of the education 
of Cato's young son, Plut. Cato, 20. Cp. also Virg. uEn. ix. 602 foil. 
"^ in Nonius, p. 156, s.v. puerae. ^ p. 281, ed. Miiller. 

N 



178 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the Sabines of central Italy, the type of men who 
could be called frugi : 

rusticorum mascula miKtum 
proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus 
versare glebas et severae 
matris ad arbitrium recisos 
portare fustis.-' 

It was an education also in demeanour, and especi- 
ally in obedience^ and modesty. In that chapter 
of Plutarch's Life of Cato which has been already 
quoted, after describing how the father taught his 
boy to ride, to box, to swim, and so on, he goes on, 
"And he was as careful not to utter an indecent 
word before his son, as he would have been in the 
presence of the Vestal Virgins." The pudor of child- 
hood was always esteemed at Rome : " adolescens 
pudentissimus " is the highest praise that can be given 
even to a grown youth ; ^ and there are signs that a 
feeling survived of a certain sacredness of childhood, 
which Juvenal reflects in his famous words, " Maxima 
debet ur puero reverentia." The origin of this feeling 
is probably to be found in the fact that both boys 
and girls were in ancient times brought up to help 
in performing the religious duties of the household, 
as camilli and camillae (acolytes) ; and this is per- 
haps the reason why they wore, throughout Roman 
history, the toga praetexta with the purple stripe, 
like magistrates and sacrificing priests.^ It is hardly 

1 Hor. Odes iii. 6. ^ Dionys. Hal. ii. 26. 

^ Cic. pro Cluentio 60. 165 ; Marq. Privatleben, p. 87. 

* See a paper by the author in Classical Rev. vol. x. p. 317, in which 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 179 

necessary to say that this religious side of education 
was an education in the practice of cult, and not in 
any kind of creed or ideas about the gods ; but so 
far as it went its influence was good, as instilling 
the habit of reverence and the sense of duty from a 
very early age. Though the Komans of Cicero's time 
had lost their old conviction of the necessity of 
propitiating the gods of the State, it is probable that 
the tradition of family worship still survived in the 
majority of households. 

Again, we may be sure that the idea of duty 
to the State was not omitted in this old-fashioned 
education. Cato wrote histories for his son in large 
letters, " so that without stirring out of the house, 
he might gain a knowledge of the illustrious actions 
of the ancient Romans, and of the customs of his 
country " : but it is significant that in the next two or 
three generations the writers of annals took to glorify- 
ing — and falsifying — the achievements of members 
of their own families, rather than those of the State 
as a whole. Boys learnt the XII Tables by heart, 
and Cicero tells us that he did this in his own boy- 
hood, though the practice had since then been dropped.^ 
That ancient code of law would have acted, we may 
imagine, as a kind of catechism of the rules laid down 

evidence is collected in support of this view. That the praetexta had a 
quasi-sacred character seems certain; see e.g. Hor. Epod. 5. 7; Persius, 
V. 30 ; pseudo - Quintilian, Declam. 340. See Henzen, Ada Fratrum 
Arvalium 15, for the pueri patrimi et matrimi, representing in that ancient 
cult the children of the old Roman family, 
^ Cic. de Legihus, ii. 59. 



i8o SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

by the State for the conduct of its citizens, and as a 
reminder that though the State had outgrown the 
rough legal clothing of its infancy, it had from the 
very beginning undertaken the duty of regulating 
the conduct of its citizens in their relations with each 
other. Again, when a great Roman died, it is said to 
have been the practice for parents to take their boys 
to hear the funeral oration in praise of one who had 
done great service to the St ate. ^ 

All this was admirable, and if Rome had not 
become a great imperial state, and if some super- 
structure of the humanities could have been added 
in a natural process of development, it might have 
continued for ages as an invaluable educational basis. 
But the conditions under which alone it could flourish 
had long ceased to be. It is obvious that it depended 
entirely on the presence of the parents and their 
interest in the children ; as regards the boys it 
depended chiefly on the father. Now ever since the 
Roman dominion was extended beyond sea, i.e. ever 
since the first two Punic wars, the father of a 
family must often have been away from home for 
long periods ; he might have to serve in foreign wars 
for years together, and in numberless cases never saw 
Italy again. Even if he remained in Rome, the ever 
increasing business of the State would occupy him 
far more than was compatible with a constant per- 
sonal care for his children. The conscientious Roman 

^ Polyb. vi. 53. For an account of the practice of laudatio see Marq. 
Frivatleben, p. 346 foil. This, too, degenerated into falsification. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES i8i 

father of the last two centuries B.C. must have felt 
even more keenly than English parents in India the 
sorrow of parting from their children at an age when 
they are most in need of parental care. We have 
to remember that in Cicero's day letter-writing had 
only recently become possible on an extended scale 
through the increasing business of the publicani in 
the provinces (see above, p. 74) ; the Eoman father 
in Spain or Asia seldom heard of what his wife and 
children were doing, and the inevitable result was 
that he began to cease to care. In fact more and 
more came to depend on the mothers, as with our 
own hard-working professional classes ; and we have 
seen reason to believe that in the last age of the 
Eepublic the average mother was not too often a 
conscientious or dutiful woman. The constant liability 
to divorce would naturally diminish her interest in 
her children, for after separation she had no part or 
lot in them. And this no doubt is one reason why 
at this particular period we hear so little of the life 
of children. There is indeed no reason to suppose 
that they themselves were unhappy ; they had plenty 
of games, which were so familiar that the poets often 
allude to them — hoops, tops, dolls, blind man's buff, 
and the favourite games of "nuts" and "king."^ 
But the real question is not whether they could enjoy 
their young life, but whether they were learning to use 
their bodies and minds to good purpose. 

When a boy was about seven years old, the 

* A full list of games will be found in Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 814 foil. 



i82 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

question would arise in most families whether he 
should remain at home or go to an elementary 
school.^ No doubt it was usually decided by the 
means at the command of the parents. A wealthy 
father might see his son through his whole education 
at home by providing a tutor (paedagogus), and 
more advanced teachers as they were needed. Cato 
indeed, as we have seen, found time to do much of 
the work himself, but he also had a slave who taught 
his own and other children. Aemilius PauUus had 
several teachers in his house for this purpose, under 
his own superintendence.^ Cicero too, as we have 
seen, seems to have educated his son at home, though 
he himself is said to have attended a school. But 
we may suppose that the ordinary boy of the upper 
classes went to school, under the care of a paedagogus, 
after the G-reek fashion, rising before daylight, and 
submitting to severe discipline, which, together with 
the absolute necessity for a free Eoman of attaining 
a certain level of acquirement, effectually compelled 
him to learn to read, write, and cipher.^ This 
elementary work must have been done well ; we hear 
little or nothing of gross ignorance or neglected 
education. 

There were, however, very serious defects in this 
system of elementary education. Not only the 
schoolmaster himself, but the paedagogus who was 

^ The question is discussed by Quintilian, i. 2. 
2 Plut. Aenu Paull. 6. 

^ Full details about elementary schools in Wilkins, oh. iv., and Marq. 
p. 90 foil. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 183 

responsible for the boy's conduct, was almost always 
either a slave or a freedman ; and neither slave nor 
freedman could be an object of profound respect for a 
Roman boy. Hence no doubt the necessity of main- 
taining discipline rather by means of corporal punish- 
ment (to which the Eomans never seem to have 
objected, though Quintilian criticises it)^ than by 
moral force ; a fact which is attested both in 
literature and art. The responsibility again which 
attached to the paedagogus for the boy's morals 
must have been another inducement to the parents 
to renounce their proper work of supervision.^ And 
once more, the great majority of teachers were G-reeks. 
As the boy was born into a bilingual Graeco-Roman 
world, of which the Greeks were the only cultured 
people, this might seem natural and inevitable ; but 
we know that in his heart the Roman despised the 
Greek. Of witnesses in their favour we might expect 
Cicero to be the strongest, but Cicero occasionally 
lets us know what he really thinks of their moral 
character. In a remarkable passage in his speech 
for Flaccus, which is fully borne out by remarks in 
his private letters, he says that he grants them all 
manner of literary and rhetorical skill, but that the 
race never understood or cared for the sacred binding 
force of testimony given in a court of law.^ Thus 
the Roman boy was in the anomalous position of 

1 Quintil. i. 3. 14. 

^ Plutarch is careful to tell us that Aem. PauUus exercised this super- 
vision himself (eh. vi.). 

3 Pro Flacco 4. 9. Cp. ad Quint. Fratr. i. 2. 4. 



i84 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

having to submit to chastisement from men whom 
as men he despised. Assuredly we should not like our 
public schoolboys to be taught or punished by men 
of low station or of an inferior standard of morals. 
It is men, not methods, that really tell in education ; 
the Eoman schoolboy needed some one to believe in, 
some one to whom to be wholly loyal ; the very same 
overpowering need which was so obvious in the 
political world of Eome in the last century b.c.^ 

Of this elementary teaching little need be said 
here, as it did not bear directly on life and conduct. 
There is, however, one feature of it which may claim 
our attention for a moment. Both in reading and 
writing, and also for learning by heart, sententiae 
(yvoofiai) were used, which remind us of our copy-book 
maxims. Of these we have a large collection, more 
than 700, selected from the mimes of Publilius Syrus, 
who came to Rome from Syria as a slave in the age 
of which we are writing, and after obtaining his 
freedom gained great reputation as the author of 
many popular plays of this kind, in which he con- 
trived to insert these wise saws and maxims. It is 
not likely that they found their way into the schools 
all at once, but in the early Empire we find them 
already alluded to as educational material by Seneca 
the elder,^ and we may take them as a fair example 
of the maxims already in use in Cicero's time, 

^ That the boy was not always respectful is shown in an amusing passage 
in Plautus, JBacchides, iii. iii. 34 foil. 
2 Sen. Controversiae, vii. 3. 8. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 185 

making some allowance for their superior neatness 
and wisdom. Here are a few specimens, taken 
almost at random ; it will be seen that they convey- 
much shrewd good sense, and occasionally have the 
true ring of humanity as well as the flavour of Stoic 
sapientia. I quote from the excellent edition by 
Mr. Bickford-Smith.^ 

Avarus ipse miseriae causa est suae. 
Audendo virtus crescit, tardando timor. 
Cicatrix conscientiae pro vulnere est. 
Fortunam ^ citius reperias quam retineas. 
Gravissima est probi hominis iracundia. 
Homo totiens moritur, quotiens amittit sues. 
Homo vitae commodatus, non donatus est. 
Humanitatis optima est certatio. 
lucundum nil est, ijisi quod reficit varietas. 
Malum est consilium quod mutari non potest. 
Minus saepe pecces, si scias quod nescias. 
Perpetuo vincit qui utitur dementia. 
Qui ius iurandum servat, quovis pervenit. 
Ubi peccat aetas maior, male discit minor. 

I have quoted these to show that Eoman children 
were not without opportunity even in early school- 
days of laying to heart much that might lead them 
to good and generous conduct in later life, as well 
as to practical wisdom. But we know the fate of 
our own copy-book maxims ; we know that it is not 
through them that our children become good men 
and women, but by the example and the un-system- 

^ London, C. J. Clay and Sons, 1895. 

2 Fortuna occurs many times, as in the so-called sententiae Varronis 
printed at the end of Riese's edition of the fragments of Varro's Menippean 
satires. This is characteristic of the period. 



i86 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

atised precepts of parents and teachers. No such neat 
'yvwjjLaL can do much good without a sanction of 
greater force than any that is inherent in them, 
and such a sanction was not to be found in the ferula 
of the grammaticus or the paedagogus. Once more, 
it is men and not methods that supply the real 
educational force. 

Probably the greatest difficulty which the Roman 
boy had to face in his school life was the learning of 
arithmetic ; it was this, we may imagine, that made 
him think of his master, as Horace did of the worthy 
Orbilius,^ as a man of blows (plagosus). This is not 
the place to give an account of the methods of 
reckoning then used ; they will be found fully 
explained in Marquardt's Privatleben, and com- 
pressed into a page by Professor Wilkins in his 
Roman Education} It is enough to say that they 
were as indispensable as they were difficult to learn. 
" An orator was expected, according to Quint ilian 
(i. 10. 35), not only to be able to make his calcula- 
tions in court, but also to show clearly to his 
audience how he arrived at his results." From the 
small inn-keeper to the great capitalist, every man 
of business needed to be perfectly at home in reckon- 
ing sums of money. The magistrates, especially 
quaestors and aediles, had staffs of clerks who 
must have been skilled accountants ; the provincial 
governors and all who were engaged in collecting 

I Hor. Epist. i. 1. 70. 
2 Marq. Privatleben, p. 95 foil. ; Wilkins, p. 53. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 187 

the tributes of the provinces, as well as in lending the 
money to enable the tax-payers to pay (see above, 
p. 71 foil), were constantly busy with their ledgers. 
The humbler inhabitants of the Empire had long 
been growing familiar with the Eoman aptitude for 
arithmetic.^ 

Grais ingenium, Grais dedit ore rotundo 

Musa loqui, praeter laudem nullius avaris. 

Eomani pueri longis rationibus assem 

discunt in partes centum diducere. " Dicat 

filius Albini : si de qiiincunce remota est 

uncia, quid superat ? poteras dixisse." " triens." " eu ! 

rem poteris servare tuam." ^ 

This familiar passage may be quoted once more to 
illustrate the practical nature of the Roman school 
teaching and the ends which it was to serve. 
Utilitarian to the backbone, the ordinary Roman, 
like the ordinary British, parent, wanted his son to 
get on in life; it was only the parent of a higher 
class who sacrificed anything to the Muses, and then 
chiefly because in a public career it was de rigueur 
that the boy should not be ignorant or boorish. 

When the son of well-to-do parents had mastered 
the necessary elements, he was advanced to the higher 
type of school kept by a grammaticus, and there 
made his first real acquaintance with literature; 
and this was henceforward, until he began to study 
rhetoric and philosophy, the staple of his work. We 

1 There is a good example of this in the well-known case of Brutus' loan 
to the Salaminians of Cyprus : see especially Cic. ad Att. v. 21. 12. 

2 Hor. Ars Poet. 323 foil. 



i88 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

may note, by the way, that science, i.e. the higher 
mathematics and astronomy, was reckoned under 
the head of philosophy, while medicine and juris- 
prudence had become professional studies,^ to learn 
which it was necessary to attach yourself to an 
experienced practitioner, as with the art of war. 
In the grammar schools, as we may call them, the 
course was purely literary and humanistic, and it 
was conducted both in Greek and Latin, but chiefly 
in Greek, as a natural result of the comparative 
scantiness of Latin literature.^ Homer, Hesiod, and 
Menander were the favourite authors studied; only 
later on, after the full bloom of the Augustan 
literature, did Latin poets, especially Virgil and 
Horace, take a place of almost equal importance. 
The study of the Greek poets was apparently a 
thorough one. It included the teaching of laijguage, 
grammar, metre, style, and subject matter, and was 
aided by reading aloud, which was reckoned of great 
importance, and learning by heart, on the part of the 
pupils. In the discussion of the subject matter any 
amount of comment was freely allowed to the master, 
who indeed was expected to have at his fingers' ends 
explanations of all sorts of allusions, and thus to 
enable the boys to pick up a great deal of odd know- 
ledge and a certain amount of history, mixed up of 
course with a large percentage of valueless mythology. 

1 Mommsen, Hist, of Rome, iv. p. 563. 

* Quintiliau was of opinion that Greek authors should precede Latin : 
i. 1. 12. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 189 

"In grammaticis," says Cicero, "poetarum pertractatio, 
historiarum cognitio, verborum interpretatio, pro- 
nuntiandi quidam sonus." ^ The method, if such it can 
be called, was not at all unlike that pursued in our own 
public schools, Eton, for example, before new methods 
and subjects came in. Its great defect in each case 
was that it gave but little opportunity for learning 
to distinguish fact from fancy, or acquiring that 
scientific habit of mind which is now becoming 
essential for success in all departments of life, and 
which at Rome was so rare that it seems audacious to 
claim it even for such a man of action as Caesar, or 
for such a man of letters as Varro. In England this 
defect was compensated to some extent by the manly 
tone of school life, but at Rome that side of school 
education was wanting, and the result was a want of 
solidity both intellectual and moral. 

The one saving feature, given a really good and 
high-minded teacher, might be the appeal to the 
example of the great and good men of the past, both 
Greek and Roman, and the study of their motives in 
action, in good fortune and ill. This is the kind of 
teaching which we find illustrated in the book of 
Valerius Maximus, which has already been alluded to, 
who takes some special virtue or fine quality as the 
subject of most of his chapters,^ — fortitudo, patientia, 
abstinentia, moderatio, pietas erga parentes, amicitia, 

^ De Oratore, i. 187. 

2 There are many subjects in the book of other kinds, but all are 
illustrated in exactly the same way. 



190 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

and so on, and illustrates them by examples and 
stories drawn mainly from Eoman history, partly also 
from Greek. This kind of appeal to the young mind 
was undoubtedly good, and the finest product of the 
method is the immortal work of Plutarch, the Lives 
of the great men of Greece and Rome, drawn up for 
ethical rather than historical purposes. But here 
again we must note a serious drawback. Any one who 
turns over the pages of Valerius will see that these 
stories of the great men of the past are so detached 
from their historical surroundings that they could not 
possibly serve as helps in the practical conduct of 
life ; they might indeed do positive mischief, by 
leading a shallow reasoner to suppose that what may 
have been justifiable at one time and under certain 
circumstances, regicide, for example, or exposure of 
oneself in battle, is justifiable at all times and in 
all circumstances. Such an appeal failed also by 
discouraging the habit of thinking about the facts 
and problems of the day ; and right-minded men like 
Cicero and Cato the younger both suffered from this 
weakness of a purely literary early training. Another 
drawback is that this teaching inevitably exaggerated 
the personal element in history, at the very time too 
when personalities were claiming more than their due 
share of the world's attention ; and thus the great 
lessons which Polybius had tried to teach the Graeco- 
Roman world, of seeking for causes in historical 
investigation, and of meditating on the phenomena of 
the world you live in, were passed over or forgotten. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 191 

But so far as the study of language, of artistic 
diction, of elocution, and intelligent reading could 
help a boy to prepare himself for life, this education 
was good ; more especially good as laying a founda- 
tion for the acquirement of that art of oratory which, 
from old Cato's time onwards, had been the chief 
end to be aimed at by all intending to take part in 
public life. Cato indeed had well said to his son, 
" Orator est, Marce fill, vir bonus dicendi peritus," ^ 
thus putting the ethical stamp of the man in the 
first place; and his "rem tene, verba sequentur" is a 
valuable bit of advice for all learners and teachers 
of literature. But more and more the end of all 
education had come to be the art of oratory, and 
particularly the art as exercised in the courts of law, 
where in Cicero's time neither truth nor fact was 
supreme, and where the first thing required was to be 
a clever speaker, — a vir bonus by all means if you 
were so disposed. But to this we shall return 
directly. 

In such schools, if he were not educated at home, 
the boy remained till he was invested with the toga 
virilis, or pura. In the late Eepublic this usually 
took place between the fourteenth and seventeenth 
years ; ^ thus the two young Ciceros seem both to 
have been sixteen when they received the toga 
virilis, while Octavian and Virgil were just fifteen, 

^ H. Jordan, M. Catonis praeter lihrum de re rustica quae extant, p. 80. 
^ Full information on this point will be found in Marquardt, Privatleben, 
p. 131 foil. 



192 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

and the son of Antony only fourteen. In former 
times it seems probable that the boy remained 
" praetextatus " till he was seventeen, the age at 
which he was legally capable of military service, and 
that he went straight from the home to the levy ; ^ 
in case of severe military pressure, or if he wished 
it himself, he might begin his first military exercises 
and even his active service, in the praetexta. But 
as in so many other ways, so here the life of the 
city brought about a change; in a city boys are 
apt to develop more rapidly in intelligence if not in 
body; and as the toga virilis was the mark of legal 
qualification as a man, they might be of more use 
to the family in the absence of the father if invested 
with it somewhat earlier than had been the primi- 
tive custom. But there was no hard and fast rule ; 
boys develop with much variation both mentally 
and physically, and, like the Eton collar of our own 
schoolboys, the toga of childhood might be retained 
or dropped entirely at the discretion of the parents. 

There is, however, a great difference in the two 
cases in regard to the assumption of the manly dress. 
With us it does not mean independence ; as a rule 
the boy remains at school for a year or two at least 
under strict discipline. At Rome it meant, on the 
contrary, that he was " of age," and in the eye of 
the law a man, capable of looking after his own 
education and of holding property. This was a 

^ See my Roman Festivals, p. 56. The Liberalia (March 17) was the 
usual day for the change, and a convenient one for the enrolment of tirones. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 193 

survival from the time when at the age of puberty 
the boy, as amoug all primitive peoples, was 
solemnly received into the body of citizens and 
warriors ; and the solemnity of the Eoman ceremony 
fully attests this. After a sacrifice in the house, 
and the dedication of his boyish toga and bulla to 
the Lar familiaris, he was invested with the plain 
toga of manhood (libera, pura), and conducted by 
his father or guardian, accompanied (in characteristic 
Roman fashion, see below, p. 271) by friends and 
relations, to the Forum, and probably also to the 
tabularium under the Capitol, where his name was 
entered in the list of full citizens.^ \ 

With the new arrangement, under which boys 
might become legally men at an earlier age than in 
the old days, it is obvious that there must often 
have been an interval before they were physically 
or mentally qualified for a profession. As the sole 
civil profession to which boys of high family would 
aspire was that of the bar, a father would send his 
son during that interval to a distinguished advocate 
to be taken as a pupil. Cicero himself was thus 
apprenticed to Mucins Scaevola the augur : and in 
the same way the young Caelius, as soon as he had 
taken his toga virilis, was brought by his father to 
Cicero. The relation between the youth and his 
preceptor was not unlike that of the contuhernium 
in military life, in which the general to whom a lad 

^ See the very interesting note (11) in Marq. p. 123, as to the enrolment 
in municipal towns. 





194 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

was committed was supposed to be responsible for 
his welfare and conduct as well as for his education 
in the art of war : thus Cicero says of Caelius ^ that 
at that period of his life no one ever saw him 
"except with his father or with me, or in the very- 
well -conducted house of M. Crassus" (who shared 
with Cicero in the guardianship). " Fuit assiduus 
mecum," he says a little farther on. This kind of 
pupilage was called the tirocinium fori, in which a 
lad should be pursuing his studies for the legal 
profession, and also his bodily exercises in the 
Campus Martins, so that he might be ready to serve 
in the army for the single campaign which was 
still desirable if not absolutely necessary. When 
he had made his first speech in a court of law, he 
was said tirocinium ponere,^ and if it were a success, 
he might devote himself more particularly hence- 
forward to the art and practice of oratory. No doubt 
all really ambitious young men, who aimed at high 
office and an eventual provincial government, would, 
like Caesar, endeavour to qualify themselves for the 
army as well as the Forum. Cicero, however, whose 
instincts were not military, served only in one 
campaign, at the age of seventeen, and apparently 
he advised Caelius to do no more than this. Caelius 
served under Q. Pompeius proconsul of Africa, to 
whom he was attached as contuhernalis, choosing 
this province because his father had estates there.* 

J Pro Caelio, 4. 9. a ^iyy ^y^ 37^ 3, 

8 Pro Caelio, 30. 72. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 195 

It was only on his return with a good character 
from Pompeius that he proceeded to exhibit his 
skill as an orator by accusing some distinguished 
person — in this case the Antonius who was after- 
wards consul w^ith Cicero.^ 

To attain the skill in oratory which would enable 
the pupil to make a successful appearance in the 
Forum, he must have gone through an elaborate 
training in the art of rhetoric. Cicero does not tell 
us whether he himself gave Caelius lessons in rhetoric, 
or whether he sent him to a professional teacher ; 
he had himself written a treatise on a part of the 
subject — the de Inventione of 80 B.C., the earliest of 
all his prose works — and was therefore quite able 
to give the necessary instruction if he found time 
to do so. It is not the object of this chapter to 
explain the meaning of rhetoric as the Graeco-Eoman 
world then understood it, or the theory of a rhetorical 
education ; for this the reader must be referred to 
Professor Wilkins' little book,^ or, better still, to the 
main source of our knowledge, the Institutio Oratoris 
of Quintilian. Something may, however, be said here 
of the view taken of a rhetorical training by Cicero 
himself, very clearly expressed in the exordium of the 
treatise just mentioned, and often more or less directly 
reiterated in his later and more mature works on 
oratory. 

" After much meditation," he says, " I have been 
led to the conclusion that wisdom without eloquence 

^ Pro Caelio, 31. 74. 2 jioman Education, ch. v. 



196 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

is of little use to a state, while eloquence without 
wisdom is often positively harmful, and never of any 
value. Thus if a man, abandoning the study of 
reason and duty, which is always perfectly straight 
and honourable, spends his whole time in the practice 
of speaking, he is being brought up to be a hindrance 
to his own development, and a dangerous citizen." 
This reminds us of Cato's saying that an orator is 
*' vir bonus dicendi peritus." Less strongly ex- 
pressed, the same view is also found in the exordium 
of another and more mature treatise on rhetoric, by 
an author whose name is unknown, written a year 
or two before that of Cicero : " Non enim parum 
in se fructus habet copia dicendi et commoditas 
orationis, si recta intelligentia et definita animi 
moderatione gubernetur." ^ We may assume that 
in Cicero's early years the best men felt that the 
rhetorical art, if it were to be of real value to the 
individual and the state, must be used with discre- 
tion, and accompanied by high aims and upright 
conduct. 

Yet within a generation of the date when these 
wise words were written, the letters of Caelius show 
us that the art was used utterly without discretion, 
and to the detriment both of state and individual. 
The high ideal of culture and conduct had been lost 
in the actual practice of oratory, in a degenerate age, 
full of petty ambitions and animosities. We ourselves 

^ Ehetorica ad Herermium, init. The date of this work was about 82 B.C. 
See a paper by the author in Journal of Philology, x. 197. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 197 

know only too well how a thing good in itself as 
a means is apt to lose its value if raised into the 
place of an end ; — how the young mind is apt to 
elevate cricket, football, golf, into the main object 
of all human activity. So it was with rhetoric ; it 
was the indispensable acquirement to enable a man 
to enjoy thoroughly the game in the Forum, and 
thus in education it became the staple commodity. 
The actual process of acquiring it was no doubt an 
excellent intellectual exercise, — the learning rules of 
composition, the exercises in applying these rules, i.e. 
the writing of themes or essays (proposita, communes 
loci), in which the pupil had " to find and arrange his 
own facts," ^ and then the declamatio, or exercise in 
actual speaking on a given subject, which in Cicero's 
day was called causa, and was later known as contro- 
versia.^ Such practice must have brought out much 
talent and ingenuity, like that of our own debating 
societies at school and college. But there were two 
great defects in it. First, as Professor Wilkins points 
out, the subjects of declamation were too often out of 
all relation to real life, e.g. taken from the Greek 
mythology; or if less barren than usual, were far 
more commonplace and flat than those of our debating 
societies. To harangue on the question whether the 
life of a lawyer or a soldier is the best, is hardly so 
inspiring as to debate a question of the day about 
Ireland or India, which educates in living fact as well 

* H. Nettleship, Lectures, etc., p. Ill ; Wilkins, p. 85 ; Quintil. xii. 2. 
2 Wilkins, l.e. 



198 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

as in the rules of tlie orator's art. Secondly, the 
whole aim and object of this " finishing " portion of a 
boy's education was a false one. Even the excellent 
Quintilian, the best of all Roman teachers, believed 
that the statesman (civilis vir) and the orator are 
identical : that the statesman must be vir bonus 
because the vir bonus makes the best orator ; that 
he should be sapiens for the same reason.^ And the 
object of oratory is '* id agere, ut iudici quae proposita 
fuerint, vera et honesta videantur" i"^ i.e. the object 
is not truth, but persuasion. We might get an idea 
of how such a training would fail in forming char- 
acter, if we could imagine all our liberal education 
subordinated to the practice of journalism. But 
fortunately for us, in this scientific age, words and the 
use of words no longer serve as the basis of education 
or as the chief nurture of young life. We need to 
see facts, to understand causes, to distinguish objective 
truth from truth reflected in books. But the perfect 
education must be a skilful mingling of the two 
methods ; and it may be as well to take care that we 
do not lose contact with the best thoughts of the 
best men, because they are contained in the literature 
we show some signs of neglecting. We may say of 
science what Cicero said of rhetoric, that it cannot 
do without sapientia. 

Of schools of philosophy I have already said 
something in the last chapter, and as the study of 

* Quintil. i. 4. 5 ; xii. 1. 1 ; xii. 2 and 7. 
s lb. xii. 1. 11. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 199 

philosophy was hardly a part of the regular curriculum 
of education properly so called, I shall pass it over 
here. The philosopher was usually to be found in 
wealthy houses, and if he were a wholesome person, 
and not a Philodemus, he might assuredly exercise a 
good influence on a young man. Or a youth might 
go to Athens or Rhodes or to some other Greek city, 
to attend the lectures of some famous professor. 
Cicero heard Phaedrus the Epicurean at Rome and 
then Philo the Academician, who had a lasting 
influence on his pupil, and then, at the age of twenty- 
seven, went to G-reece for two years, studying at 
Athens, Rhodes, and elsewhere. Caesar also went to 
Rhodes, and he and Cicero both attended the lectures 
of Molo in rhetoric, in which study, as well as in 
philosophy, lectures were to be heard in all the great 
Greek cities.^ Cicero sent his own son to "the 
University in Athens " at the age of twenty, giving 
him an ample allowance and doubtless much good 
advice. The young man soon outran his allowance 
and got into debt ; the good advice he seems to 
have failed to utilise, and in fact gave his father 
considerable anxiety. 

The following letter, which seems to show that 
a youth who had excellent opportunities might still 
be lacking in principle and self-control, is the only one 
which survives of the letters of undergraduates of 
that day. It was written by the young Cicero, after 
he had repented and undertaken to reform, not to 

^ Plut. Cic. 4 ; Caes. 3. 



200 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

his father himself, but to the faithful friend and 
freedman of his father, Tiro, who afterwards edited 
the collection of letters in which he inserted it/ It 
is on the whole a pleasing letter, and seems to show 
real affection for Tiro, who had known the writer 
from his infancy. It is a little odd in the choice of 
words, perhaps a trifle rhetorical. The reader shall 
be left to decide for himself whether it is perfectly- 
straight and genuine. In any case it may aptly 
conclude this chapter. 

"I had been anxiously expecting letter-carriers 
day after day, when at last they arrived forty-six 
days after they left you. Their arrival was most 
welcome to me. I took the greatest possible pleasure 
in the letter of the kindest and best beloved of fathers, 
but your own delightful letter put the finishing touch 
to my joy. So I no longer repent of dropping letter- 
writing for a time, but am rather glad I did so, for 
my silence has brought me a great reward in your 
kindness. I am very glad indeed that you accepted 
my excuse without hesitation. 

"I am sure, my dearest Tiro, that the reports about 
me which reach you answer your best wishes and 
hopes. I will make them good, and I will do my 
best that this beginning of a good report about me 
may daily be repeated. So you may with perfect 
confidence fulfil your promise of being the trumpeter 
(buccinator) of my reputation. For the errors of my 
youth have caused me so much remorse and suffering, 

^ ad Fam. xvi. 21. The translation is based on Mr. Shuckburgh's. 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 201 

that it is not only my heart that shrinks from what 
I did — my very ears abhor the mention of it. I 
know for a fact that you have shared my trouble and 
sorrow, and I don't wonder ; you always wished me 
to do well not only for my sake but for your own. 
So as I have been the means of giving you pain, I 
will now take care that you shall feel double joy on 
my account. 

" Let me tell you that my attachment to Cratippus 
is that of a son rather than a pupil : I enjoy his 
lectures, but I am especially charmed by his delight- 
ful manners. I spend whole days with him, and 
often part of the night, for I get him to dine with 
me as often as I can. We have grown so intimate 
that he often drops in upon us unexpectedly while 
we are at dinner, lays aside the stiff air of a 
philosopher, and joins in our jests with the greatest 
good will. He is such a man, so delightful, so dis- 
tinguished, that you ought to make his acquaint- 
ance as soon as ever you can. As for Bruttius, I 
never let him leave me. He is a man of strict and 
moral life, as well as being the most delightful 
company. Surely it is not necessary that in our 
daily literary studies there should never be any fun at 
all. I have taken a lodging close to him, and as far as 
I can with my pittance I subsidise his narrow means. 
I have also begun practising declamation in Greek 
with Cassius ; in Latin I like having my practice 
with Bruttius. My intimate friends and daily com- 
pany are those whom Cratippus brought with him 



202 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

from Mitylene, — good scholars, of whom he has the 
highest opinion. I also see a great deal of Epicrates, 
the leading man at Athens, and Leonides, and people 
of that sort. So now you know how I am going on. 

" You say something in your letter about Gorgias. 
The fact is that I found him very useful in my daily 
practice of declamation, but I put my father's injunc- 
tions before everything else, and he had written 
telling me to give up Gorgias at once. I wouldn't 
shilly-shally about it, for fear my making a fuss 
might put some suspicion in my father's head. 
Moreover it occurred to me that it would be 
oiSensive for me to express an opinion on a decision 
of my father's. However, your interest and advice 
are welcome and acceptable. 

" Your apology for want of time I readily accept, 
for I know how busy you always are. I am very 
glad you have bought an estate, and you have 
my best wishes for the success of your purchase. 
Don't be surprised at my congratulations coming 
at this point in my letter, for it was at the corre- 
sponding point in yours that you told me of this. 
You must drop your city manners (urbanitates) ; you 
are a ' rusticus Romanus ! ' How clearly I see your 
dearest face before me at this moment ! I seem to 
see you buying things for the farm, talking to your 
bailiff, saving the seeds at dessert in your cloak. 
But as to the matter of money, I am sorry I was 
not there to help you. Don't doubt, my dear Tiro, 
about my helping you in the future, if fortune will 



m 



VI EDUCATION OF UPPER CLASSES 203 

but stand by me, especially as I know that this 
estate has been bought for our mutual advantage. 
As to my commissions about which you are taking 
trouble, many thanks! I beg you to send me a 
secretary at the first opportunity, if possible a 
Greek : for he will save me much trouble in copying 
out notes. Above all, take care of your health, that 
we may have some literary talk together some day. 
I commend Anteros to you. Adieu." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE SLAVE POPULATION 

In the last age of the Republic the employment of 
slave labour reached its high-water mark in ancient 
history.^ We have already met with evidence of 
this in examining the life of the upper classes ; in 
the present chapter we must try to sketch, first, the 
conditions under which it was possible for such a 
vast slave system to arise and flourish, and secondly, 
the economical and ethical results of it both in city 
and country. The subject is indeed far too large 
and complicated to be treated in a single short 
chapter, but our object throughout this book is 
only to give such a picture of society in general 
as may tempt a student to further and more exact 
inquiry. 

We have seen that the two upper classes of 
society were engaged in business of various kinds, 
and especially in banking and carrying out public 
contracts, or in the work of government, and in 

^ See Ber Bom. Gutshetrieh, by H. Gummerus, reprinted from Klio, 1906 : 
an excellent specimen of economic research, to which I am much indebted 
in this chapter. — E. Meyer, Die Sclamrei im AUertum, p. 46. 

204 



CHAP. VII THE SLAVE POPULATION 205 

Italian agriculture. All this business, public and 
private, called for a vast amount of labour, and in 
part, of skilled labour; the great men provided the 
capital, but the details of the work, as it had 
gradually developed since the war with Hannibal, 
created a demand for workmen of every kind such as 
had never before been known in the Graeco-Roman 
world. Clerks, accountants, messengers, as well as 
operatives, were wanted both by the Government and 
by private capitalists. In the households of the rich 
the great increase of wealth and luxury had led to a 
constant demand for helps of all kinds, each with a 
certain amount of skill in his own particular depart- 
ment ; and on the estates in the country, which were 
steadily growing bigger, and were tending to be 
worked more and more on capitalistic lines, labour, 
both skilled and unskilled, was increasingly required. 
Thus the demand for labour was abnormally great, 
and had been created with abnormal rapidity, and 
the supply could not possibly be provided by the 
free population alone. The lower classes of city 
and country were not suited to the work wanted, 
either by capacity or inclination. It was not for 
a free Roman to be at the beck and call of an 
employer, like the clerks and underlings of to-day, 
or to act as servant in a great household ; and for 
a great part of the necessary work he was not 
sufficiently well educated. Far less was it possible 
for him to work on the great cattle-runs. And the 
State wanted the best years of his life for service in 



2o6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the army, which, as has been well remarked, was the 
real industry of the Koman freeman. But luckily in 
one sense, and in another unluckily, for Rome, there 
was an endless supply of labour to be had, of every 
quality and capacity, for the very same abnormal 
circumstances which had created the demand also 
provided the supply. The great wars and the wealth 
accruing from them in various ways had produced a 
capitalist class in need of labour, and also created a 
slave-market on a scale such as the world has never 
known before or since. 

Ever since the time of Alexander and the wars of 
his successors with each other and their neighbours, 
it is probable that the supply of captives sold as 
slaves had been increasing ; and in the second 
century B.C. the little island of Delos had come to 
be used as a convenient centre for the slave trade. 
Strabo tells us in a well-known passage that 10,000 
slaves might be sold there in a single day.^ But 
Rome herself was in the time of Cicero the great 
emporium for slaves ; the wars which were most 
productive of prisoners had been for long in the 
centre and the west of the Mediterranean basin. All 
armies sent out from Rome were accompanied by 
speculators in this trade, who bought the captives 
as they were put up to auction after a battle, and 
then undertook the transport to Rome of all who 
were suited for employment in Italy or were not 
bought up in the province which was the seat of war. 

1 strabo, p. 668. 



VII THE SLAVE POPULATION 207 

The enormous number of slaves thus made avail- 
able, even if we make allowance for the uncertainty of 
the numbers as they have come down to us, surpasses 
all belief; we may take a few examples, sufficient to 
give some idea of a practice which had lasting and 
lamentable results on Roman society. 

After the campaign of Pydna and the overthrow 
of the Macedonian kingdom, Aemilius PauUus, one 
of the most humane of Eomans, sold into slavery, 
under orders from the senate, 150,000 free inhabit- 
ants of communities in Epirus which had sided with 
Perseus in the war/ After the war with the Cimbri 
and Teutones, 90,000 of the latter and 60,000 of the 
former are said to have been sold ; ^ and though the 
numbers may be open to suspicion, as they amount 
again to 150,000, the fact of an enormous capture 
is beyond question. Caesar, like Aemilius Paullus 
one of the most humane of Romans, tells us himself 
that on a single occasion, the capture of the Aduatuci, 
he sold 53,000 prisoners on the spot.^ And of 
course every war, whether great or small, while it 
diminished the free population by slaughter, pesti- 
lence, or capture, added to the number of slaves. 
Cicero himself, after his campaign in Cilicia and 
the capture of the hill stronghold Pindonissus, did 
of course as all other commanders did ; we catch 
a glimpse of the process in a letter to Atticus : 
" mancipia venibant Saturnalibus tertiis." * It is 

^ Livy xlv. 34, 2 Ljyy^ ^^^^ gg^ 

3 Caesar, B. G. ii. 33. ^ ad Att. v. 20. 5. 



2o8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

hardly necessary to point out that we should be 
getting our historical perspective quite wrong if we 
allowed ourselves to expect in these cultured Eoman 
generals any sign of compassion for their victims ; 
it was a part of their mental inheritance to look on 
men who had surrendered as simply booty, the 
property of the victors ; Roman captives would 
meet with the same fate, and even for them httle 
pity was ever felt. When Caesar in 49 within a 
few months dismissed two surrendered armies of 
Roman soldiers, once at Corfinium and again in 
Spain, he was doubtless acting from motives of 
policy, but the enslavement of Roman citizens by 
their fellows would, we may hope, have been re- 
pugnant to him, if not to his own soldiers.^ 

War then was the principal source of the supply 
of slaves, but it was not the only one. When a 
slave-trade is in full swing, it will be fostered in all 
possible ways. Brigandage and kidnapping were 
rife all over the Empire and in the countries beyond 
its borders in the disturbed times with which we 
are dealing. The pirates of Cilicia, until they were 
suppressed by Pompeius in 66, swarmed all over the 
Mediterranean, and snapped up victims by raids 
even on the coasts of Italy, selling them in the 
market at Delos without hindrance. Cicero, in his 

^ Wallon {Eist. de VEsclavage, ii. p. 38) has noted that Virgil alone shows 
a feeling of tenderness for the lot of the captive, quoting Aen. iii. 320 foil, 
(the speech of Andromache) : but this was for the fate of a princess, and a 
mythical princess. No Latin poet of that age shows any real sympathy 
with captives or with slaves. 



THE SLAVE POPULATION 209 

speech in support of the appointment of Pompey, 
mentions that well-born children had been carried 
off from Misenum under the very eyes of a Eoman 
praetor.^ Caesar himself was taken by them when 
a young man, and only escaped with difficulty. In 
Italy itself, where there was no police protection 
until Augustus took the matter in hand, kidnapping 
was by no means unknown ; the grassatores, as they 
were called, often slaves escaped from the prisons 
of the great estates, haunted the public roads, and 
many a traveller disappeared in this way and passed 
the rest of his life in a slave -prison.^ Varro, in 
describing the sort of slaves best suited for work on 
the great sheep-runs, says that they should be such 
as are strong enough to defend the flocks from wild 
beasts and brigands — the latter doubtless quite as 
ready to seize human beings as sheep and cattle. 
And slave-merchants seem to have been constantly 
carrying on their trade in regions where no war was 
going on, and where desirable slaves could be pro- 
cured; the kingdoms of Asia Minor were ransacked 
by them, and when Marius asked Nicomedes king 
of Bithynia for soldiers during the struggle with the 
Cimbri, the answer he got was that there were none 
to send — the slave-dealers had been at work there. ^ 
Every one will remember the line of Horace in 

^ Cic. pro lege Manilla 12. 23. Plutarch, in his Life of Pompey 24, adds 
that Romans of good standing would join in the pirates' business in order 
to make profit in this scandalous way. 

^ Suet. Aug. 32, of the period before Augustus. 

3 Varro, B.B. ii. 10 ; Diodorus xxxvi. 3. 1. 

P 



2IO SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

which he calls one of these wretches a "king of 
Cappadocia." ^ 

There were two other sources of the slave supply, 
of which however little need be said here, as the 
contribution they made was comparatively small. 
First, slaves were bred from slaves, and on rural 
estates this was frequently done as a matter of 
business.^ Varro recommends the practice in the 
large sheep -farms,^ under certain conditions ; and 
some well-known lines of Horace suggest that on 
smaller farms, where a better class of slaves would 
be required, these home-bred ones were looked on 
as the mark of a rich house, " ditis examen domus." * 
Secondly, a certain number of slaves had become 
such under the law of debt. This was a common 
source of slavery in the early periods of Roman 
history, but in Cicero's day we cannot speak of it 
with confidence. We have noticed the cry of the 
distressed freemen of the city in the conspiracy of 
Catiline, which looks as though the old law were 
still put in force ; and in the country there are signs 
that small owners who had borrowed from large 
ones were in Varro's time in some modified condition 
of slavery,^ surrendering their labour in lieu of pay- 

1 Hor. Hpist. i. 6. 39 :— 

"Mancipiis locuples eget aeris Cappadocum rex: 
Ne fueris hie tu." 

2 Varro, B.E. i. 17. ^ tj, 2. 10. 3. 

^ Hor. Epode 2. 65. Cp. TibuU. ii. 1. 25 "turbaqne vernarum, saturi 
bona signa coloni." 

^ See Gummerus, op. cit. p. 63, who considers the obaeratus of Varro as 
the equivalent of the addictus of the Roman law of debt. 



VII THE SLAVE POPULATION 211 

ment. But all these internal sources of slavery are 
as nothing compared with the supply created by war 
and the slave-trade. 

This supply being thus practically unlimited, 
prices ran comparatively low, and no Eoman of 
any considerable means at all need be, or was, 
entirely without slaves. He had only to go, or to 
send his agent, to one of the city slave -markets, 
such as the temple of Castor,^ where the slave- 
agents (mangones) exhibited their "goods" under 
the supervision of the aediles ; there he could pick 
out exactly the kind of slave he wanted at any 
price from the equivalent of £10 upwards. The 
unfortunate human being was exhibited exactly 
as horses are now, and could be stripped, handled, 
trotted about, and treated with every kind of indignity, 
and of course the same sort of trickery went on in 
these human sales as is familiar to all horse-dealers 
of the present day.^ The buyer, if he wanted a 
valuable article, a Greek, for example, who could act 
as secretary or librarian, like Cicero's beloved Tiro, 
or even a household slave with a special character 
for skill in cooking or other specialised work of a 
luxurious family, would have to give a high price ; 
even as long ago as the time of the elder Cato 
a very large sum might be given for a single choice 

^ See the well-known description of the Forum in Plautus' CurcuUo, iv. 1 : 
"pone aedem Castoris, ibi sunt subito quibu' credas male" ; Marq. Privat- 
leben, p. 168 ; Wallon, op. cit. ch. ii. 

^ Gellius iv. 2 gives an extract from the edict of the aediles drawn up 
with the object of counteracting such sharp practice. 



212 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

slave, and Cato as censor in 184 attempted to check 
such high prices by increasing the duties payable 
on the sales/ Towards the close of the Republican 
period we have little explicit evidence of prices ; 
Cicero constantly mentions his slaves, but not their 
values. Doubtless for fancy articles huge prices 
might be demanded ; Pliny tells us that Antony 
when triumvir bought two boys as twins for more 
than £800 apiece, who were no doubt intended 
for handsome pages, perhaps to please Cleopatra.^ 
But there can be no doubt that ordinary slaves 
capable of performing only menial offices in town or 
country were to be had at this time quite cheap, 
and the number in the city alone must have been 
very great. 

It is unfortunately quite impossible to make even 
a probable estimate of the total number in Rome ; 
the data are not forthcoming. Beloch^ remarks 
aptly that though some families owned hundreds of 
slaves, the number of such families was not large, 
quoting the words of Philippus, tribune in 104 B.C., 
to the effect that there were not more than two 
thousand persons of any substance in the State.* 
The great majority of citizens living in Rome had, 
he thinks, no slaves. He is forced to take as a basis 

^ Livy xxxix. 44. 

2 N.R. vii. 55. This story affords a good example of the tricks of the 
trade : the boys were not twins, and came from different countries, though 
exactly alike. 

* Bevolkerung, p. 403. \ 

* Cic. Off. ii. 21. 73. .< 



vii THE SLAVE POPULATION 213 

of calculation the proportion of bond to free in tlie 
only city of the Empire about which we have certain 
information on this point ; at Pergamum there was 
one slave to two free persons.^ Assuming the whole 
free population to have been about half a million in 
the time of Augustus, or rather more, including 
peregrini, he thus arrives at a slave population of 
something like 280,000 ; this may not be far off the 
mark, but it must be remembered that it is little 
more than a guess. 

What has been said above will have given the 
reader some idea of the conditions of life which 
created a great demand for labour in the last two 
centuries B.C., and of the circumstances which produced 
an abundant supply of unfree labour to satisfy that 
demand. I propose now to treat the whole question 
of Eoman slavery from three points of view, — the 
economic, the legal, and the ethical. In other words, 
we have to ask : (1) how the abundance of slave labour 
afiected the social economy of the free population ; 
(^) what was the positioin of the slave in the eye of 
the law, as regards treatment and chance of manu- 
mission ; (3) what were the ethical results of this 
great slave system, both on the slaves themselves 
and on their masters. 

1. From an economical point of view the most 
interesting question is whether slave labour seriously 
interfered with the development of free industry ; 
and unfortunately this question is an extremely 

^ Galen v. p. 49, ed. Kuhn ; Galen was a native of this great city. 



214 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

difficult one to answer. We can all guess easily that 
the opportunities of free labour must have been 
limited by the presence of enormous numbers of 
slaves ; but to get at the facts is another matter. In 
regard to rural slavery we have some evidence to go 
upon, as we shall see directly, and this has of late 
been collected and utilised ; but as regards labour in 
the city no such research has as yet been made,^ and 
the material is at once less fruitful and more difficult 
to handle. A few words on this last point must 
suffice here. 

"We have seen in Chapter II. that there was plenty 
of employment at Eome for freemen. Friedlander, 
than whom no higher authority can be quoted for the 
social life of the city, goes so far as to assert that 
even under the early Empire a freeman could always 
obtain work if he wished for it ; ^ and even if we take 
this as a somewhat exaggerated statem.ent, it may 
serve to keep us from rushing to the other extreme 
and picturing a population of idle free paupers. In 
fact we are bound on general evidence to assume for 
our own period that he is in the main right; the 
poor freeman of Eome had to live somehow, and the 
cheap corn which he enjoyed was not given him 
gratis until a few years before the Republic came to 
an end.^ How did he get the money to pay even 
the sum of six asses and a third for a modius of 
corn, or to pay for shelter and clothing, which were 

^ Dr, Gummerus promises it. ® Sittengeschichte, i., ed. 5, p. 264. 

3 Probably by Clodius in 58. 



vn THE SLAVE POPULATION 215 

assuredly not to be had for notliing ? We know 
again, that the gilds of trades (see above, p. 45) con- 
tinued to exist in the last century of the Republic,^ 
though the majority had to be suppressed owing to 
their misuse as political clubs. Supposing that the 
members of these collegia were small employers of 
labour, it is reasonable to assume that the labour 
they employed was at least largely free ; for the 
capital needed to invest, at some risk, in a sufficient 
number of slaves, who would have to be housed and 
fed, and whose lives would be uncertain in a crowded 
and unhealthy city, could not, we must suppose, be 
easily found by such men. Here and there, no doubt, 
we find traces of slave labour in factories, e.g. as far 
back as the time of Plautus, if we can take him as 
writing of Eome rather than translating from the 
Greek : 

An te ibi vis inter istas versarier 
Prosedas, pistorum arnicas, reginas alicarias, 
Miseras schoeno delibutas servilicolas sordidas ? ^ 

Poenulus, 265 folL 

But on the whole, we may with all due caution, in 
default of complete investigation of the question, 
assume that the Roman slaves were confined for the 
most part to the great and rich families, and were 
not used by them to any great extent in productive 

^ Asconius ad Cic. pro Cornel., ed. Clark, p. 75 ; Waltzing, Corporations 
professionelles, i. p. 90 foil. 

2 Baking as a trade only came in, as we saw, in 174 ; Plautus died in 184 j 
some doubt is thus thrown on the Roman character of the passage, or the 
allusion may not be to a public bakery. 



2i6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

industry, but in supplying the luxurious needs of the 
household/ In all probability research will show 
that free labour was far more available than we are 
apt to think. We hear of no outbreak of feeling 
against slave labour, which might suggest a rivalry 
between the two. Slave labour, we may think, had 
filled a gap, created by abnormal circumstances, and 
did not oust free labour entirely ; but it tended con- 
stantly to cramp it, and doubtless started notions of 
work in general which helped to degrade it.^ Those 
immense yam^7^ag urhanae, of which the historian of 
slavery has given a detailed account in his second 
volume,^ belong rather to the early Empire than to the 
last years of the Republic — the evidence for them is 
drawn chiefly from Seneca, Juvenal, Tacitus, Martial, 
etc. ; but such evidence as we have for the age of 
Cicero seems to suggest that the vast palaces of 
the capitalists, which Sallust describes as being 
almost like cities,^ were already beginning to be 
served by a familia urbana which rendered them 
almost independent of any aid from without by 
labour or purchase. Not only the ordinary domestic 
helpers of all kinds, but copyists, librarians, paedagogi 
as tutors for the children, and even doctors might 
all be found in such households in a servile condition, 

^ See a remarkable passage of Athenaeus (vi. 104) quoted by Marquardt, 
Frivatleben, p. 156, on the use of slaves at Rome for unproductive labour. 

2 Sallust, e.g., says of his own life in retirement that he would not engage 
in "agrum colendo aut venando, servilibus officiis." — Catil. 4. 

^ Wallon, Hist, de VEsclavage, vol. ii. ch. iii. 

* Sail. Catil, 12. 



vn THE SLAVE POPULATION 217 

without reckoning tlie great numbers who seem to 
have been always available as escorts when the great 
man was travelling in Italy or in the provinces. 
Valerius Maximus tells us^ that Cato the censor as 
proconsul of Spain took only three slaves with him, 
and that his descendant Cato of Utica during the 
Civil Wars had twelve ; as both these men were 
extremely frugal, we can form an idea from this 
passage both of the increasing supply of slaves and of 
the far larger escorts which accompanied the ordinary 
wealthy traveller. 

As regards the familia rustica, the working 
population of the farm, the evidence is much more 
definite. The old Eoman farm, in which the pater- 
familias lived with his wife, children, and slaves, was, 
no doubt, like the old English holding in a manor, 
for the most part self-sufficing, doing little in the way 
of sale or purchase, and worked by all the members 
of the famiha, bond and free. In the middle of the 
second century B.C., when Cato wrote his treatise on 
husbandry, we find that a change has taken place ; 
the master can only pay the farm an occasional visit, 
to see that it is being properly managed by the slave 
steward^ (vilicus), and the business is being run 
upon capitalistic lines, i.e. with a view to realising 
the utmost possible profit from it by the sale of its 
products. Thus Cato is most particular in urging 

^ iv. 3. 11 and 12. Plutarch says that as military tribune Cato the 
younger had fifteen slaves with him. — Cato minor 9. 
2 Cato, B.B. 2. 1. 



2i8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

that a farm should be so placed as to have easy 
communication with market towns, where the wine 
and oil could be sold, which were the chief products, 
and where various necessaries could be bought cheap, 
such as pottery and metal- work of all kinds/ Thus 
the farm does not entirely depend on the labour of 
its own familia ; nevertheless it rests still upon an 
economic basis of slave labour. For an olivetum of 
240 jugera Cato puts the necessary hands as thirteen 
in number, all non-free ; for a vineyard of 100 jugera 
at sixteen ; and these figures are no doubt low, if we 
remember his character for parsimony and profit- 
making.^ Free labour was to be had, and was 
occasionally needed ; at the very outset of his work 
Cato (ch. 4) insists that the owner should be a good 
and friendly neighbour, in order that he may easily 
obtain, not only voluntary help, but hired labourers 
(operarii). These were needed especially at harvest 
time, when extra hands were wanted, as in our hop- 
gardens, for the gathering of olives and for the 
vintage. Sometimes the work was let out to a 
contractor, and he gives explicit directions (in 
chs. 144 and 145) for the choice of these and 
the contracts to be made with them ; whether 
in this case the contractor (redemptor) used entirely 
free or slave labour does not appear distinctly, 
but it seems clear that a proportion at least was 

^ In ch. 135 lie mentions towns where many other objects may be bought 
best and cheapest : at Rome, e.g., clothing and rugs, at Cales and Minturnae 
farm-instruments of iron, etc. See also Gummerus, op. cit. p. 36. 

2 B.R. 10 and 11. 



VII THE SLAVE POPULATION 219 

free.^ What the free labourers did at other times of 
the year, whether or no they were small cultivators 
themselves, Cato does not tell us. 

For the age with which we are more specially con- 
cerned, we have the evidence of Varro's three books 
on husbandry, written in his old age, after the fall of 
the Kepublic. Here we find the economic condition 
of the farm little changed since the time of Cato. 
The permanent labour is non-free, but in spite of the 
vast increase in the servile labour available in Italy, 
there is still a considerable employment of freemen 
at certain times, on all farms where the olive and 
vine were the chief objects of culture. In the 17th 
chapter of his first book, in which he gives interesting 
advice for the purchase of suitable slaves, he begins 
by telling us that all land is cultivated either by 
slaves or freemen, or both together, and the free are 
of three kinds, — either small holders (pauperculi) 
with their children ; or labourers who live by wage 
(conducticii), and are especially needed in hay harvest 
or vintage ; or debtors who give their labour as 
payment for what they owe (obaerati).^ Varro too, 
like Cato, recognises the necessity of purchasing 
many things which cannot well be manufactured on 
a farm of moderate size, and thus the landowner may 
in this way also have been indirectly an employer of 

* Assiduos homines quinquaginta praebeto, i.e. the contractor : ch. 144. 

2 See the discussion of this word in Gummerus, p. 62 folL Varro defines 
them as those "qui suas operas in servitutem dant pro pecunia quam 
debebant" {de Ling. Lat. vii. 105), i.e. they give their labour as against 
servitude. 



220 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

free labour; but so far as possible the farm should 
supply itself with the materials for its own working/ 
for this gives employment to the slaves throughout the 
year, — and they should never be allowed to be idle.^ 

Thus it is abundantly clear that even in the time 
of Cicero there was a certain demand for free labour 
in the ordinary Italian oliveyard and vineyard, and 
that the necessary supply was forthcoming, though 
the permanent industrial basis was non-free, and the 
tendency was to use slave-labour more exclusively. 
The rule that the slave cannot be allowed to be 
unemployed was a most important factor in the 
economical development, and drove the landowner, 
who never seems to have had any doubt about the 
comparative cheapness of slave-labour,^ gradually to 
make his farm more and more independent of all 
aid from outside. In the work of Columella, written 
towards the end of the first century a.d., it is plain 
that the work of the farm is carried on more 
exclusively by slave -labour than was the case in 
the last two centuries B.C.* 

To this not unpleasant picture of the conditions 
of Italian agricultural slavery a few words must be 
added about the great pastoral farms of Southern 

1 E.E. i. 22, 

2 Cp. Plut. Cato the Elder 21 ; a slave must be at work when he is not 
asleep. 

^ This is a point on which I cannot enter, but there can hardly be a 
doubt that in the long run free labour is cheaper. See Cairnes, Slave Power 
in America, ch. iii. ; Salvioli, Ze Capitalisme, p. 253 ; Columella, Prae/atio. 

* Gummerus, p. 81, At the same time the small cultivator is an obvious 
fact in Columella, cultivating his bit of land without working for others. 



vn THE SLAVE POPULATION 221 

Italy. If a man invested his capital in a com- 
paratively small estate of olives and vineyards, such 
as that which Cato treats of, and which seems to 
have been his own ; or even in a latifundium of the 
kind which Varro more vaguely pictures, containing 
also parks and game and a moderate amount of 
pasture, he would need slaves mainly of a certain 
degree of skill. But on the largest areas of pasture, 
chiefly in the hill districts of Southern Italy, where 
there was little cultivation except what was necessary 
for the consumption of the slaves themselves, these 
were the roughest and wildest type of bondsmen. 
The work was that of the American ranche, the life 
harsh, and the workmen dangerous. It was in these 
districts and from these men that Spartacus drew the 
material with which he made his last stand against 
Roman armies in 72-71 B.C. ; and it was in this 
direction that Caelius and Milo turned in 48 B.C. in 
quest of revolutionary and warlike bands. These 
roughs could even be used as galley-slaves ; more 
than once in the Commentaries on the Civil War 
Caesar tells us that his opponents drafted them into 
the vessels which were sent to relieve the siege of 
Massilia.^ It was here too, in the neighbourhood of 
Thurii, that a bloody fight took place between the 
slaves of two adjoining estates, strong men of courage, 
as Cicero describes them, of which we learn from the 
fragments of his lost speech pro Tullio. They were 

1 For Spartacus, Appian, B.C. i. 116; for Caelius, Caesar, B.C. iii. 22; 
and cp, B. 0. i. 56. 



222 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

of course armed, and as we may guess from Varro's 
remarks on the kind of slaves suitable for shepherd- 
ing,^ this was usually the practice, in order to defend 
the flocks from wild beasts and robbers, particularly 
when they were driven up to summer pasture (as 
they still are) in the saltus of the Apennines. The 
needs of these shepherds would be small, and the 
latifundia of this kind were probably almost self- 
sufficing, no free labour being required. After their 
day's work the slaves were fed and locked up for the 
night, and kept in fetters if necessary ; ^ they were 
in fact simply living tools, to use the expression of 
Aristotle, and the economy of such estates was as 
simple as that of a workshop. The exclusion of free 
labour is here complete : on the agricultural estates 
it was approaching a completion which it fortunately 
never reached. Had it reached that completion, the 
economic influence of slavery would have been 
altogether bad ; as it was, the introduction of slave- 
labour on a large scale did valuable service to Italian 
agriculture in the last century B.C. by contributing 
the material for its revival at a time when the 
necessary free labour could not have been found. 
However lamentable its results may have been in other 
ways, especially on the great pastures, the economic 
history of Italy, when it comes to be written, will have 
to give it credit for an appreciable amount of benefit. 
2. The legal and political aspect of slavery. A 
slave was in the eye of the law not a persona^ but a 

1 B.B. ii. 10. 2 Columella i. 8. 



vn THE SLAVE POPULATION 223 

res, i.e. lie had no rights as a human being, could not 
marry or hold property, but was himself simply a 
piece of property which could be conveyed (res 
mancipi)/ During the Eepubhcan period the law 
left him absolutely at the disposal of his master, who 
had the power of life and death (jus vitae necisque) 
over him, and could punish him with chastisement 
and bonds, and use him for any purpose he pleased, 
without reference to any higher authority than his 
own. This was the legal position of all slaves ; but 
it naturally often happened that those who were men 
of knowledge or skill, as secretaries, for example, 
librarians, doctors, or even as body -servants, were 
in intimate and happy relations with their owners,^ 
and in the household of a humane man no well- 
conducted -slave need fear bodily degradation. Cicero 
and his friend Atticus both had slaves whom they 
valued, not only for their useful service, but as 
friends. Tiro, who edited Cicero's letters after his 
death, and to whom we therefore owe an eternal 
debt of gratitude, was the object of the tenderest 
affection on the part of his owner, and the letters 
addressed to him by the latter when he was taken 
ill at Patrae in 50 B.C. are among the most touching 
writings that have come down to us from antiquity. 
" I miss you," he writes in one of them,^ " yes, but I 

^ Gaius ii. 15. 

^ For examples of slaves' devotion to their masters, Appian, B. C. iv. 29 ; 
Seneca, de Benef. iii. 25. 

' ad Fam. xvi. 1 ; read also the charming letters which follow. Tiro 
was manumitted by Cicero at an unknown date. 



224 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

also love you. Love prompts the wish to see you in 
good health : the other motive would make me wish 
to see you as soon as possible, — and the former one 
is the best," Atticus, too, had his Tiro, Alexis, 
"imago Tironis," as Cicero calls him in a letter to 
his friend,^ and many others who were engaged in 
the work of copying and transcribing books, which 
was one of Atticus' many pursuits. All such slaves 
would sooner or later be manumitted, i.e. transmuted 
from a res to a persona ; and in the ease with which 
this process of transmutation could be effected w^e 
have the one redeeming point of the whole system of 
bondage. According to the oldest and most efficient 
form (vindicta), a legal ceremony had to be gone 
through in the presence of a praetor ; but the praetor 
could easily be found, and there was no other difficulty. 
This was the form usually adopted by an owner wishing 
to free a slave in his own lifetime ; but great numbers 
were constantly manumitted more irregularly, or by 
the will of the master after his death. ^ 

Thus the leading facts in the legal position of the 
Roman slave were two : (1) he was absolutely at the 
disposal of his owner, the law never interfering to 
protect him ; (2) he had a fair prospect of manumis- 
sion if valuable and well-behaved, and if manumitted 
he of course became a Roman citizen (libertus or 
libertinus) with full civil rights,^ remaining, however, 

^ ad Alt. xii. 10. 

^ See the article " Manumissio " in Did. of Antiquities. 
^ Only in exercising the jus suffragii he was limited with all his fellow 
libertini to one of the four city tribes. 



vii THE SLAVE POPULATION 225 

according to ancient custom, in a certain position of 
moral subordination to his late master, owing him 
respect, and aid if necessary. Let us apply these 
two leading facts to the conditions of Roman life as 
we have already sketched them. We shall find that 
they have political results of no small importance. 

^irst, we must try to realise that the city of 
Kome contained at least 200,000 human beings over 
,whom the State had no direct control whatever. 
All such crimes, serious or petty, as are now tried 
and disposed of in our criminal courts, were then, 
if committed by a slave, punishable only by the 
master ; and in the majority of cases, if the familia 
were a large one, they probably never reached his 
ears. The jurisdiction to ^hich the slave was 
responsible was a private one, like that of the great 
feudal lord of the Middle Ages, who had his own 
prison and his own gallows. The political result was 
much the same in each case. Just as the feudal lord, 
with his private jurisdiction and his hosts of retainers, 
became a peril to good government and national 
unity until he was brought to order by a strong king 
like our Henry IL or Henry VIL, so the owner of 
a large familia of many hundreds of slaves may 
almost be said to have been outside of the State ; 
undoubtedly he became a serious peril to the good 
order of the capital. The part played by the 
slaves in the political disturbances of Cicero's time 
was no mean one. One or two instances will show 
this. Saturninus, in the year 100, when attacked by 



226 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Marius under orders from the senate, had hoisted a 
pilleus, or cap of hberty which the emancipated slave 
wore, as a signal to the slaves of the city that they 
might expect their liberty if they supported him ; ^ 
and Marius a few years later took the same step 
when himself attacked by Sulla. Catiline, in 63, 
Sallust assures us, believed it possible to raise the 
slaves of the city in aid of his revolutionary plans, and 
they flocked to him in great numbers ; but he after- 
wards abandoned his intention, thinking that to mix 
up the cause of citizens with that of slaves would 
not be judicious.^ It is here too that the gladiator 
slaves first meet us as a political arm ; Cicero had 
the next spring to defend P. Sulla on the charge, 
among others, of having bought gladiators during 
the conspiracy with seditious views, and the senate 
had to direct that the bands of these dangerous men 
should be dispersed to Capua and other municipal 
towns at a distance. Later on we frequently hear 
of their being used as private soldiery, and the 
government in the last years of the Eepublic ceased 
to be able to control them.^ Again, in defending 
Sestius, Cicero asserts that Clodius in his tribunate 
had organised a levy of slaves under the name of 
collegia, for purposes of violence, slaughter, and 
rapine ; and even if this is an exaggeration, it shows 

1 Val. Max. viii. 6. 2. 

2 Sail. Cat. 24 and 56 ; Wallon, ii. p. 318 foil. 

^ See, e.g., Cic. ad Att. ii. 24. 3 ; Asconius, in Milonianam (ed. Clark, 
p. 31) ; Milo's host of slaves had gladiators among them, and were organised 
in military fashion (an antesignanus, p. 32), when he fell in with Clodius. 



VII THE SLAVE POPULATION 227 

that such proceedings were not deemed impossible.^ 
And apart from the actual use of slaves for 
revolutionary objects, or as private body-guards, 
it is clear from Cicero's correspondence that as 
an important part of a great man's retinue they 
might indirectly have influence in elections and 
on other political occasions. Quintus Cicero, in his 
little treatise on electioneering,^ urges his brother 
to make himself agreeable to his tribesmen, neigh- 
bours, clients, freedmen, and even slaves, "for nearly 
all the talk which affects one's public reputation 
emanates from domestic sources." And Marcus him- 
self, in the last letter he wrote before he fled into 
exile in 58, declares that all his friends are promis- 
ing him not only their own aid, but that of their 
clients, freedmen, and slaves, — promises which doubt- 
less might have been kept had he stayed to take 
advantage of them.' 

The mention of the freedmen in this letter may 
serve to remind us of the political results of manu- 
mission, the second fact in the legal aspect of Eoman 
slavery. The most important of these is the rapid 
importation of foreign blood into the Eoman citizen 
body, which long before the time of Cicero largely 
consisted of enfranchised slaves or their descendants ; 
it was to this that Scipio Aemilianus alluded in his 
famous words to the contio he was addressing after 
his return from Numantia, " Silence, ye to whom 

1 Pro Sestio, 15. 34. 2 j)g p^t, Consulatus, 5. 17. 

^ ad Quint. Fratr. i. 2 ad fin. 



228 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Italy is but a stepmother " (Val. Max. 6. 2. 3). Had 
manumission been Held in check or in some way 
superintended by the State, there would have been 
more good than harm in it. Many men of note, who 
had an influence on Roman culture, were libertini, such 
as Livius Andronicus and Caecilius the poets ; Terence, 
Publilius Syrus, whose acquaintance we made in the 
last chapter ; Tiro and Alexis, and rather later Verrius 
Flaccus, one of the most learned men who ever 
wrote in Latin. But the great increase in the 
number of slaves, and the absence of any real 
difficulty in effecting their manumission, led to the 
enfranchisement of crowds of rascals as compared 
with the few valuable men. The most striking 
example is the enfranchisement of 10,000 by Sulla, 
who according to custom took his name Cornelius, 
and, though destined to be a kind of military 
guarantee for the permanence of the SuUan institu- 
tions, only became a source of serious peril to the 
State at the time of Catiline's conspiracy. Caesar, 
who was probably more alive to this kind of social 
danger than his contemporaries, sent out a great 
number of libertini, — the majority, says Strabo, of 
his colonists, — to his new foundation at Corinth.^ 
But Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the time 
of Augustus, when he stayed some time in Rome, 
draws a terrible picture of the evil effects of indis- 
criminate manumission, unchecked by the law.^ 

" Many," he says, " are indignant when they see 

1 strabo, p. 381. ^ Dion_ jjal. iv. 23. 



vn THE SLAVE POPULATION 229 

unworthy men manumitted, and condemn a usage 
which gives such men the citizenship of a sovereign 
state whose destiny is to govern the world. As for 
me, I doubt if the practice should be stopped alto- 
gether, lest greater evil should be the result ; I 
would rather that it should be checked as far as 
possible, so that the state may no longer be invaded 
by men of such villainous character. The censors, or 
at least the consuls, should examine all whom it is 
proposed to manumit, inquiring into their origin and 
the reasons and mode of their enfranchisement, as in 
their examination of the equites. Those whom they 
find worthy of citizenship should have their names 
inscribed on tables, distributed among the tribes, 
with leave to reside in the city. As to the crowd 
of villains and criminals, they should be sent far 
away, under pretext of founding some colony." 

These judicious remarks of a foreigner only ex- 
pressed what was probably a common feeling among 
the best men of that time. Augustus made some 
attempt to limit the enfranchising power of the 
owner ; but the Leges Aelia Sentia and Furia Caninia 
do not lie within the compass of this book. No 
great success could attend these efforts ; the ab- 
normal circumstances which had brought to Rome 
the great familiae of slaves reacted inevitably upon 
the citizen body itself through the process of manu- 
mission. Rome had to pay heavily in this, as in 
so many other ways, for her advancement to the 
sovereignty of the civilised world. I may be allowed 



230 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

to translate the eloquent words in which the French 
historian of slavery, in whose great work the history 
of ancient slavery is treated as only a scholar- 
statesman can treat it, sums up this aspect of the 
subject : 

"Emancipation, prevalent as it might appear to 
be towards the beginning of the Empire, was not 
a step towards the suppression of slavery, but a 
natural and inevitable sequence of the institution 
itself, — an outlet for excess in an epoch over- 
abundant in slaves : a means of renewing the mass, 
corrupted by the deleterious influence of its own 
condition, before it should be totally ruined. As 
water, diverted from its free course, becomes impure 
in the basin which imprisons it, and when released, 
will still retain its impurity ; so it is not to be 
thought that instincts perverted by slavery, habits 
depraved from childhood, could be reformed and 
redressed in the slave by a tardy liberation. Thrust 
into the midst of a society itself vitiated by the 
admixture of slavery, he only became more unre- 
strainedly, more dangerously bad. Manumission was 
thus no remedy for the deterioration of the citizens : 
it was powerless even to better the condition of the 
slave." 1 

3. The ethical aspect of Eoman slavery. What 
were the moral effects of the system (1) on the slaves 
themselves ; (2) on the freemen who owned them ? 

First, as regards the slaves themselves, there are 

^ Wallon, op. cit. ii. p. 436. 



vn THE SLAVE POtULATION 231 

two facts to be fully realised ; when this is done, 
the inferences will be sufficiently obvious. Let us 
remember that by far the greater number of the 
slaves, both in the city and on the land, were 
brought from countries bordering on the Mediter- 
ranean, where they had been living in some kind 
of elementary civilisation, in which the germs of 
further development were present in the form of the 
natural ties of race and kinship and locality, of tribe 
or family or village community, and with their own 
religion, customs, and government. Permanent cap- 
tivity in a foreign land and in a servile condition 
snapped these ties once and for all. To take a single 
appalling instance, the 150,000 human beings who 
were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror 
of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported 
out of their own country — and these were probably 
the vast majority, — were thereby deprived for the 
rest of their lives of all social and family life, of 
their ancestral worship, in fact of everything that 
could act as a moral tie, as a restraining influence 
upon vicious instincts. With the lamentable effect 
of this on the regions thus depopulated we are not 
here concerned, but it was beyond doubt most 
serious, and must be taken into account in reckoning 
up the various causes which later on brought about 
the enfeeblement of the whole Roman Empire.^ The 
point for us is that a large proportion of the popula- 
tion of Rome and of Italy was now composed of 

^ See Otto Seeck, GeschicMe des Untergangs der antiken Welt, ch. iv. and v. 



232 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

human beings destitute of all natural means of moral 
and social development. The ties that had been 
once broken could never be replaced. There is no 
need to dwell on the inevitable result, — the introduc- 
tion into the Eoman State of a poisonous element of 
terrible volume and power. 

The second fact that we have to grasp is this. In 
the old days, when such slaves as there then were 
came from Italy itself, and worked under the master's 
own eye upon the farm, they might and did share to 
some extent in the social life of the family, and even 
in its religious rites, and so might under favourable 
circumstances come within the range of its moral 
influences.^ But towards the close of the Republican 
period those moral influences, as we have seen, were 
fast vanishing in the majority of families which pos- 
sessed large numbers of slaves. The common kind 
of slave in the city, who was not attached to his 
owner as was a man of culture like Tiro, had no 
moral standard except implicit obedience ; the highest 
virtue was to obey orders diligently, and fear of 
punishment was the only sanction of his conduct. 
The typical city slave, as he appears in Plautus, 
though by no means a miserable being without any 
enjoyment of life, is a liar and a thief, bent on over- 
reaching, and destitute of a conscience.^ We need 

^ See Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 172. 

^ Wallon (ii. p, 255 foil. ) has collected a number of examples. Plautus' 
slaves are as much Athenian as Roman, but the conditions would be much 
the same in each case. Cp. Varro, Men. Sat. ed. Riese, p. 220 : ' ' Crede 
mihi, plures dominos servi comederunt quam canes." 



vii THE SLAVE POPULATION 233 

but reflect that the slave must often have had 
to do vile things in the name of his one virtue, 
obedience, to realise that the poison was present, and 
ready to become active, in every Roman household. 
" Nee turpe est quod dominus iubet." ^ 

On the latifundia in the country the master was 
himself seldom resident, and the slaves were under the 
control of one or more of their own kind, promoted 
for good conduct and capacity. The slaves of the 
great sheep and cattle farms were, as we saw, of the 
wildest sort, and we may judge of their morality 
by the story of the Sicilian slave-owner who, when 
his slaves complained that they were insufficiently 
clothed, told them that the remedy was to rob the 
travellers they fell in with.^ The ergastula, where 
slaves were habitually chained and treated like beasts, 
were sowing the seeds of permanent moral contamina- 
tion in Italy. ^ But on the smaller estates of olive- 
yard and vineyard their condition was better, and 
a humane owner who chose his overseers carefully 
might possibly reproduce something of the old feeling 
of participation in the life as well as the industry of 
the economic unit. In an interesting chapter Varro 
advises that the vilicus should be carefully selected, 
and should be conciliated by being allowed a wife and 
the means of accumulating a property {pecuUum) ; he 
even urges that he should enforce obedience rather 

^ Petronius, Sat. 75. ^ Diodorus xxxiv. 38. 

3 "Coli rura ab ergastulis pessimum est et quicquid agitur a de- 
sperantibus," wrote Pliny {Nat. Hist, xviii. 36) in the famous passage about 
latifundia. 



234 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

by words than blows.^ But of the condition of the 
ordinary slave on the farm this is the only hint he 
gives us, and it never seems to have occurred to 
him, or to any other Roman of his day, that the 
work to be done would be better performed by men 
not deprived by their condition of a moral sense ; 
that slave labour is unwillingly and unintelligently 
rendered, because the labourer has no hope, no sense 
of dutiful conduct leading him to rejoice in the 
work of his hands. Nor did any writer recognise the 
fact that slaves were potentially moral beings, until 
Christianity gave its sanction to dutiful submission 
as an act of morality that might be consecrated by a 
Divine authority.^ 

Lastly, it is not difficult to realise the mischievous 
effects of such a slave system as the Roman upon 
the slave-owning class itself. Even those who them- 
selves had no slaves would be affected by it ; for 
though, as we have seen, free labour was by no means 
ousted by it, it must have helped to create an idle 
class of freemen, with all its moral worthlessness. 
Long ago, in his remarkable book on The Slave Power 
in America before the Civil War, Professor Cairnes 
drew a striking comparison between the "mean whites" 
of the Southern States, the result of slave labour on 
the plantations, and the idle population of the Roman 
capital, fed on cheap corn and ready for any kiud of 

1 E.R. i. 17. 

^ See some excellent remarka on this subject in Ecce Eomo, towards 
the end of ch, xii. ( "Universality of the Christian Republic "). 



vii THE SLAVE POPULATION 235 

rowdyism.^ But in the case of tjbe great slave-owners 
the mischief was much more serious, though perhaps 
more difficult to detect. The master of a horde of 
slaves had half his moral sense paralysed, because he 
had no feeling of responsibility for so many of those 
with whom he came in contact every day and hour. 
"When most members of a man's household or estate 
are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no feeling 
of any contractual relation with them, his sense of 
duty and obligation is inevitably deadened, even 
towards others who are not thus in his power. Can 
we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice and 
right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but 
also towards a man's fellow-citizens, which we have 
noticed in the two upper sections of society, was due 
in great part to the constant exercise of arbitrary 
power at home, to the habit of looking upon the men 
who ministered to his luxurious ease as absolutely 
without claim upon his respect or his benevolence ? 
or that the recklessness of human life which was 
shown in the growing popularity of bloody gladia- 
torial shows, and in the incredible cruelty of the 
victors in the Civil Wars, was the result of this 
unconscious cultivation, from childhood onwards, of 
the despotic temper?^ Even the best men of the 
age, such as Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, show hardly a 

^ The Slave Power, ch. v., and especially p. 374 foil. A living picture of 
the mean white may be found in Mark Twain's Euckleierry Finn, drawn 
from his own early experience, particularly in ch. xxi. 

^ " Regum nobis induimus animos," wrote Seneca in a well-known letter 
about the claims of slaves as human beings, Ep. 47. 



236 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap, vn 

sign of any sympathy with, or interest in, that vast 
mass of suffering humanity, both bond and free, 
with which the Roman dominion was populated; 
to disregard misery, except when they found it 
among the privileged classes, had become second 
nature to them. We can better realise this if we 
reflect that even at the present day, in spite of the 
absence of slavery and the presence of philanthropical 
societies, the average man of wealth gives hardly 
more than a passing thought to the discomfort and 
distress of the crowded population of our great cities. 
The ordinary callousness of human nature had, under 
the baleful influence of slavery, become absolute 
blindness, nor were men's eyes to be opened until 
Christianity began to leaven the world with the 
doctrine of universal love. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE HOUSE OP THE RICH MAN, IN TOWN 
AND COUNTRY 

We saw tliat the poorer classes in Rome were 
lodged in huge insulae, and enjoyed nothing that 
can be called home life. The wealthy families, on 
the other hand, lived in domus, i.e. separate dwell- 
ings, accommodating only one family, often, even in 
the Ciceronian period, of great magnificence. But 
even these great houses hardly suggest a life such 
as that which we associate with the word home. 
As Mr. Tucker has pointed out in the case of 
Athens,^ the warmer climates of Greece and Italy 
encouraged all classes to spend much more of their 
time out of doors and in public places than we do ; 
and the rapid growth of convenient public buildings, 
porticoes, basilicas, baths, and so on, is one of the 
most striking features in the history of the city 
during the last two centuries B.C. Augustus, part 
of whose policy it was to make the city population 
comfortable and contented, carried this tendency still 

^ Life in Ancient Athens, p. 55. 
237 



238 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

further, and under the Empire the town house played 
quite a subordinate part in Roman social life. The 
best way to realise this out-of-door life, lazy and 
sociable, of the Augustan age, is to read the first 
book of Ovid's Ars Amatoria, — a fascinating picture 
of a beautiful city and its pleasure -loving inhabi- 
tants. But with the Augustan age we are not here 
concerned. 

Yet the Koman house, like the Italian house in 
general, was in origin and essence really a home. 
The family was the basis of society, and by the 
family we must understand not only the head of 
the house with his wife, children, and slaves, but 
also the divine beings who dwelt there. As the 
State comprised both human and divine inhabitants, 
so also did the house, which was indeed the germ and 
type of the State. Thus the house was in those early 
times not less but even more than a house is for us, 
for in it was concentrated all that was dear to the 
family, all that was essential to its life, both natural 
and supernatural. And the two — the natural and 
supernatural — were not distinct from each other, but 
associated, in fact almost identical ; the hearth-fire 
was the dwelling of Vesta, the spirit of the flame ; 
the Penates were the spirits of the stores on which 
the family subsisted, and dwelt in the store-cupboard 
or larder ; the paterfamilias had himself a super- 
natural side, in the shape of his Genius ; and the 
Lar familiaris was the protecting spirit of the farm- 
land, who had found his way into the house in course 



VIII HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 239 

of time, perhaps with the slave labourers, who always 
had a share in his worship.^ 

It would probably be unjust to the Roman of the 
late Republic to assume that this beautiful idea of 
the common life of the human and divine beings in 
a house was entirely ignored or forgotten by him. 
No doubt the reality of the belief had vanished ; it 
could not be said of the city family, as Ovid said of 
the farm-folk : ^ 

ante focos olim scamnis considere longis 

mos erat et mensae credere adesse deos. 

The great noble or banker of Cicero's day could no 
longer honestly say that he believed in the real 
presence of his family deities ; the kernel of the old 
feeling had shrunk away under the influence of Greek 
philosophy and of new interests in life, new objects 
and ambitions. But the shell remained, and in some 
families, or in moments of anxiety and emotion, even 
the old feeling of religio may have returned. Cicero 
is appealing to a common sentiment, in a passage 
already once quoted {de Domo, 109), when he insists 
on the real religious character of a house : " hie arae 
sunt, hie foci, hie di penates : hie sacra; religiones, 
caerimoniae continentur." And this was in the heart 
of the city ; in the country-house there was doubtless 
more leisure and opportunity for such feeling. In 
the second century B.C. old Cato had described the 

^ For this view of the Lar see Wissowa, Religion und Kultvs der E'&mer, 
p. 148 foil. ; and a note by the author in ArcMv fur EeligionswissenscMft, 
1906, p. 529. 

2 Fasti, vi. 299. 



240 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the 
city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about 
his round of inspection; and even Horace hardly 
shows a trace of the agnostic when he pictures the 
slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting 
at their meal in front of the image of the.Lar.^ We 
may perhaps guess that with the renewal of the love of 
country life, and with that revival of the cultivation of 
the vine and olive, and indeed of husbandry in general, 
which is recognisable as a feature of the last years of 
the Eepublic, and which is known to us from Varro's 
work on farming, and from Virgil's Georgics, the old 
religion of the household gained a new life. 

It is not necessary here to give any detailed ac- 
count of the shape and divisions of a Eoman house of 
the city ; full and excellent descriptions may be found 
in Middleton's article "Domus" in the Dictionary 
of Antiquities, and in Lanciani's Ruins and Excava- 
tions of Ancient Borne ; and to these should be added 
Man's work on Pompeii, where the houses were of a 
Eoman rather than a Greek type. What we are 
concerned with is the house as a home or a centre 
of life, and it is only in this aspect of it that we 
shall discuss it here. 

The oldest Italian dwelling was a mere wigwam 
with a hearth in the middle of the floor, and a hole 
at the top to let the smoke out. But the house of 
historical times was rectangular, with one central 
room or hall, in which was concentrated the whole 

^ Cato, E.E., ch. ii. init. ; Horace, Upode 2. 65 ; Sat. ii. 6. 65. 



VIII HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 241 

indoor life of the family, the whole meaning and 
purpose of the dwelling. Here the human and 
divine inhabitants originally lived together. Here 
was the hearth, " the natural altar of the dwelling- 
room of man," as Aust beautifully expresses it ; ^ this 
was the seat of Vesta, and behind it was the penus 
or store-cioset, the seat of the Penates; thus Vesta 
and the Penates are in the most genuine sense the 
protecting and nourishing deities of the household. 
Here, too, was the Lar of the familia with his little 
altar, behind the entrance, and here was the lectus 
genialis,^ and the Genius of the paterfamilias. As 
you looked into the atrium, after passing the 
vestihulum or space between street and doorway, 
and the ostium or doorway with its janua, you saw 
in front of you the impluvium, into which the rain- 
water fell from the compluvium, i.e. the square 
opening in the roof with sloping sides; on either 
side were recesses (alae), which, if the family were 
noble, contained the images of the ancestors. Opposite 
you was another recess, the tahlinum, opening prob- 
ably into a little garden ; here in the warm weather 
the family might take their meals. 

This is the atrium of the old Roman house, and 
to understand that house nothing more is needed. 
And indeed architecturally, the atrium never lost 
its significance as the centre of the house ; it is to 

^ Romische Religion, p. 214. 

^ Or lectulus adversus, i.e. opposite the door ; Ascon. ed. Clark, p. 43, 
a good passage for the contents of an atrium. 

R 



242 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

the house as the choir is to a cathedral.^ And it is 
easy to see how naturally it could develop into a 
much more complicated but convenient dwelling ; 
for example, the alae could be extended to form 
separate chambers or sleeping -rooms, the tablinum 
could be made into a permanent dining-room, or 
such rooms could be opened out on either side of 
it. A second story could be added, and in the city, 
where space was valuable, this was usually the case. 
The garden could be converted, after the Greek 
fashion, and under a Greek name, into a peristylium, 
i.e. an open court with a pretty colonnade round it, 
and if there were space enough, you might add at 
tlje rear of this again an exedra, or an oecus, i.e. open 
saloons convenient for many purposes. Thus the 
house came to be practically divided into two parts, 
the atrium with its belongings, i.e. the Eoman part, 
and the peristylium with its developments, forming 
the Greek part ; and the house reflects the composite 
character of Eoman life in its later period, just as 
do Eoman literature and Eoman art. The Eoman 
part was retained for reception rooms, and the Lar, 
the Penates, and Vesta, with their respective seats, 
retired into the new apartments for privacy. When 
the usual crowd of morning callers came to wait upon 
a great man, they would not as a rule penetrate 
farther than the atrium, and there he might keep 
them waiting as long as he pleased. The Greek 
part of the house, the peristylium and its belongings, 

* See Mau's Pompeii, p. 248. 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 243 

was reserved for his family and his most intimate 
friends. In Pompeii, which was an old Greek town 
with Eoman life and habits superadded, we find 
atrium and peristylium both together as early as the 
second century b.c.^ At what period exactly the 
house of the noble in Rome began thus to develop 
is not so certain. But by the time of Cicero every 
good domus had without doubt its private apartments 
at the rear, varying in shape and size according to 
the ground on which the house stood. ^ 

The accompanying plan will give a sufficiently clear 
idea of the development of the domus from the atrium, 
and its consequent division into two parts ; it is that 
of " the house of the silver wedding " at Pompeii. ' 

But in spite of all the convenience and comfort 
of the fully developed dwelling of the rich man at 
Rome, there was much to make him sigh for a 
quieter life than he could enjoy in the noisy city. 
He might indeed, if he could afford it, remove outside 
the walls to a "domus suburbana," on one of the roads 
leading out of Rome, or on the hill looking dowTi on 
the Campus Martins, like the house of Sallust the 
historian, with its splendid gardens, which still in 
part exists in the dip between the Quirinal and 
the Pincian hills. ^ But nowhere within three miles 

^ Mau, Pompeii, p. 240. 

^ The extent to which this could be carried can be guessed from Sail. 
Cat. 12. 

^ Quintus Cicero, growing rich with Caesar in Gaul, had a fancy for a 
domus suburbana : Cic. ad Q. Fr. iii, 1. 7. Marcus tells his brother in this 
letter that he himself had no great fancy for such a residence, and that his 



244 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



CHAP. 



or more of Rome could a man lose his sense of being 
in a town, or escape from the smoke, the noise, the 
excitement of the streets. After what has been said 




Plan of the House of the Silver Wedding. From Mau's Pc/mpeii. 



a. Fauces. 

d. Tetrastyle atrium. 

n. Dining-room. 

o. Tablinum. 

p. Andron. 

r. Peristyle. 

s. Kitchen. 
t-v. Bath. {v. Apodyterium. w. Tepi- 
darium. t. Caldarium.) 

w. Summer dining-room. 
X, z. Sleeping-rooms. 

y. Bxedra. 



1. Open-air swimming tank, in a 
small garden (2). 

3. Corridor leading to another houso 

and to a side street. 

4. Oecus. 

6. Garden, partially excavated. 
1. Open-air triclinium. 
o-t. Fauces, atrium, and other rooms 
of separate dwelling connected 
with the larger house. 



in previous chapters, the crowd in the Forum and 
its adjuncts can be left to the reader's imagination ; 

house on the Palatine had all the charm of such a suburbana. His villa at 
Tusculum, as we shall see, served the purpose of a house close to the city. 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 245 

but if he wishes to stimulate it, let him look at 
the seventh chapter of Cicero's speech for Plancius, 
where the orator makes use of the jostling in the 
Forum as an illustration so familiar that none can 
fail to understand it.^ A relief, of which a figure is 
given in Burn's Roman Literature and Roman Art, 
p. 79, gives a good idea of the close crowding, 
though no doubt it was habitual with Roman artists 
to overcrowd their scenes with human figures. Even 
as early as the first Punic war a lady could complain 
of the crowded state of the Forum, and, with the 
grim humour peculiar to Romans, could declare that 
her brother, who had just lost a great number of 
Roman lives in a defeat by the Carthaginians, ought 
to be in command of another fleet in order to relieve 
the city of more of its surplus population. What 
then must the Forum have been two centuries later, 
when half the business of the Empire was daily 
transacted there ! And even outside the walls the 
trouble did not cease; all night long the wagons 
were rolling into the city, which were not allowed in 
the day-time, at any rate after Caesar's municipal law 
of 46 B.C. Like the motors of to-day, one might 
imagine that their noise would depreciate the value 
of houses on the great roads. The callers and clients 
would be here of a morning, as in the house within 
the walls ; the bore might be met not only in the 
Via Sacra, like Horace's immortal friend, but wher- 

^ A great number of passages about the noise and crowds of Rome are 
collected in Mayor's Notes to Juvenal, pp. 173, 203, 207. 



246 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

ever the stream of life hurried with its busy eddies.^ 
LuciHus drew a graphic picture of this feverish life, 
which is fortunately preserved ; it refers of course to 
a time before Cicero's birth (Fragm. 9, Baehrens) : 

nunc vero a mani ad noctem, festo atque profesto, 
totus item pariter populus, plebesque patresque, 
iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam : 
nni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti, 
verba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose : 
blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se : 
insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes. 



^k 



lilt this exciting social atmosphere, with its 
jostling and over -reaching in the Forum, and its 
callers and dinner-parties in the house, had some 
sinister influence on men's tempers and nerves, there 
can be no doubt. Cicero dearly loved the life of the 
city, but he paid for it by a sensibility which is 
constantly apparent in his letters, and diminished 
his value as a statesman. "When he wrote from 
Cilicia to his more youthful friend Caelius, urging 
him to stick to the city, in words that are almost 
pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was 
prescribing exactly that course of treatment which 
had done himself much damage.^ The clear sight 
and strong nerve of Caesar, as compared with so 
many of his contemporaries, was doubtless largely 

^ Some interesting remarks on the general aspect of the city will be found 
in the concluding chapter of Lanciani's Buins and Excavations. For the 
bore elsewhere than in Rome, see below, p. 256. 

2 ad Fam. ii. 12 : " Urbem, Urbem, mi Rufe, cole, et in ista luce vive. 
Omnis peregrinatio (foreign travel) obscura et sordida est iis, quorum 
industria Roma potest illustris esse," etc. 



VIII HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 247 

due to tlie fact that between 70 and 50 B.C., i.e. in 
tlie prime of life, he spent some twelve of the twenty 
years in the fresher air of Spain and Gaul. Some 
men were fairly worn out with dissipation and the 
resulting ennui, and could get no relief even in a 
country villa. Lucretius has drawn a wonderful 
picture of such an unfortunate, who hurries from 
Eome into the country, and finding himself bored 
there almost as soon as he arrives, orders out his 
carriage to return to the city. To fill oneself with 
good things, yet never to be satisfied (explere bonis 
rebus, satiareque nunquam), was even for the true 
Epicurean a most dismal fate.^ 

But there was at this time, and had been for 
many generations, a genuine desire to escape at times 
from town to country ; and Cicero, in spite of his 
pathetic exhortation to Caelius, was himself a keen 
lover of the ease and leisure which he could find 
only in his country-houses. The first great Eoman 
of whom we know that he had a rural villa, not only 
or chiefly for farming purposes, but as a refuge from 
the city and its tumult, was Scipio Africanus the 
elder. His villa at Litem um on the Campanian 
coast is described by Seneca in his 86th epistle; 
it was small, and without the comforts and con- 
veniences of the later country-house; but its real 
significance lies not so much in the increasing wealth 
that could make a residence possible without a farm 

' Lucr. ii. 22 foil.; iii. 1060 foil. Cp. Seneca, Ep. 69: "Frequens 
migratio instabilis animi est ! " 



248 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

attached to it, but in the growing sense of indi- 
viduality that made men wish for such a retreat. 
There are other signs that Scipio was a man of strong 
personality, unlike the typical Roman of his day ; he 
put a value upon his own thoughts and habits, apart 
from his duty to the State, and retired to Liternum 
to indulge them. The younger Scipio too (Aemili- 
anus), though no blood-relation of his, had the same 
instinct, but in his case it was rather the desire for 
leisure and relaxation, — the same love of a real 
holiday that we all know so well in our modern 
life. " Leisure," says Cicero, is not " contentio animi 
sed relaxatio " ; and in a charming passage he goes on 
to describe Scipio and Laelius gathering shells on the 
sea -shore, and becoming boys again (repuerascere).^ 
This desire for ease and relaxation, for the chance 
of being for a while your true self, — a self worth 
something apart from its existence as a citizen, is 
apparent in the Eoman of Cicero's day, and still 
more in the hard-working functionary of the Empire. 
Twice in his life the morbid emperor Tiberius shrank 
from the eyes of men, once at Rhodes and afterwards 
at Capreae, — a melancholy recluse worn out by hard 
work. 

Everyman had to provide his own "health resort" 
in those days : there was nothing to correspond to 
the modern hotel. Even at the great luxurious 
watering-places on the Campanian coast, Baiae and 
Bauli, the houses, so far as we know, were all private 

1 de Oratore, ii. 22, 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 249 

residences.^ I do not propose to include in this 
chapter any account of these centres of luxury and 
vice, which were far indeed from giving any rest or 
relief to the weary Eoman ; the society of Baiae 
was the centre of scandal and gossip, where a woman 
like Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus, could live in 
wickedness before the eyes of all men.^ Let us 
turn to a more agreeable subject, and illustrate the 
country-house and the country life of the last age of 
the RepubUc by a rapid visit to Cicero's own villas. 
This has fortunately been made easy for us by the 
very delightful work of Professor 0. E. Schmidt, 
whose genuine enthusiasm for Cicero took him in 
person to all these sites, and inspired him to write of 
them most felicitously.^ 

There being no hotels, among which the change- 
loving Roman of Cicero's day could pick and choose 
a retreat for a holiday, he would buy a site for a 
villa first in one place, then in another, or purchase 
one ready built, or transform an old farmhouse of 
his own into a residence with " modern requirements." 
In choosing his sites he would naturally look south- 
wards, and find what he sought for either in the 
choicer parts of Latium, among the hills and woods 
of the Mons Albanus and Tusculum, or in the rich 

^ These houses, with the coast on which they stood, have long sunk into 
the sea, and we are only now, thanks to the perseverance of Mr. R. T. 
Giinther of Magdalen College, realising their position and former magnifi- 
cence. See his volume on Earth Movomnts in the Bay of Naples. 

2 See Cic. pro Caelio, §§ 48-50. 

^ Cicero's Villen, Leipzig, 1889. 



250 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Campanian land, tlie paradise of the lazy Roman ; 
in the latter case, he would like to be close to the 
sea on that delicious coast, and even in Latium there 
were spots where, like Scipio and Laelius, he might 
wander on the sea-shore. All this country to the 
south was beginning to be covered with luxurious 
and convenient houses ; in the colder and mountain- 
ous parts of central Italy the villa was still the 
farmhouse of the older useful type, of which the 
object was the cultivation of olive and vine, now 
coming into fashion, as we have already seen. For 
Cicero and his friends the word villa no longer 
suggested farming, as it invariably did for the old 
Roman, and as we find it in Cato's treatise on agricul- 
ture ; it meant gardens, libraries, baths, and collections 
of works of art, with plenty of convenient rooms 
for study or entertainment. Sometimes the garden 
might be extended into a park, with fishponds and 
great abundance of game ; Hortensius had such a 
park near Laurentum, fifty jugera enclosed in a ring- 
fence, and full of wild beasts of all sorts and kinds. 
Varro tells us that the great orator would take his 
guests to a seat on an eminence in this park, and 
summon his " Orpheus " thither to sing and play : at 
the sound of the music a multitude of stags, boars, 
and other animals would make their appearance — 
having doubtless been trained to do so by expectation 
of food prepared for them.^ Such was the taste of 
the great master of " Asiatic " eloquence. We are 

^ Varro, B.B. iii. 13. 



VIII HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 251 

reminded of the fairy tale of the Emperor of China 
and the mechanical nightingale. 

His great rival in oratory had simpler tastes, in 
his country life as in his rhetoric. Cicero had no 
villa of the vulgar kind of luxury ; he preferred to 
own several of moderate comfort rather than one or 
two of such magnificence. He had in all six, besides 
one or two properties which were bought for some 
special temporary object ; and it is interesting to see 
what relation these houses had to his life and habits. 
At no point could he afi'ord to be very far from Rome, 
or from a main road which would take him there 
easily. The accompanying little map will show that 
all his villas lay on or near to one or other of the 
two great roads that led southwards from the capital. 
The via Latina would take him in an hour or two to 
Tusculum, where, since the death of Catulus in 68, 
he owned the villa of that excellent aristocrat.^ The 
site of the villa cannot be determined with certainty, 
but Schmidt gives good reasons for believing that it 
was where we used formerly to place it, on the slope 
of the hill above Frascati. That it really stood there, 
and not in the hollow by Grottaferrata,^ we would 
willingly believe, for no one who has ever been there 
can possibly forget the glorious view or the refreshing 
air of those flowery slopes. No wonder the owner 
was fond of it. He tells Atticus, when he first came 

^ The villa had once been Sulla's also : and the aristocratic connection 
gave its ovmer some trouble. See above, p. 102. 
^ Schmidt, op. cit. p. 31. 



252 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



CHAP. 



into possession of it, that he found rest there from 
all troubles and toils {ad Att. i. 5. 7.), and again that 
he is so delighted with it that when he gets there 
he is delighted with himself too (ad Att. i. 6). Much 
of his literary work was done here, and he had the 




Emery Walker sc.-' 



Map to illustbate the Position of Cicero's Villas. 

great advantage of being close to the splendid library 
of Lucullus' neighbouring villa, which was always open 
to him.^ At Tusculum he spent many a happy day, 
until his beloved daughter died there in 45, after 
which he would not go there for some time ; but he 
got the better of this sorrow, and loved the place 
to the end of his life. 

^ de Finibus, iii. 2. 7. 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 253 

If this villa was where we hope it was, the great 
road passed at no great distance from it, in the valley 
between Tusculum and the Mons Albanus ; and by- 
following this for some fifty miles to the south-east 
through Latium, Cicero would strike the river Liris 
not far from Fregellae, and leaving the road there, 
would soon arrive at his native place Arpinum, and 
his ancestral property. For this old home he always 
had the warmest affection ; of no other does he write 
in language showing so clearly that his heart could 
be moved by natural beauty, especially when com- 
bined with the tender associations of his boyhood.^ 
In the charming introduction to the second book of 
his work de Legibus (on the Constitution), he dwells 
with genuine delight on this feeling and these associa- 
tions ; and there too we get a hint of what Dr. Schmidt 
tells us is the peculiar charm of the spot, — the 
presence and the sound of water ; for if he is right, 
the villa was placed between two arms of the limpid 
little river Fibrenus, which here makes a delta as it 
joins the larger Liris.^ 

But of this house we know for certain neither the 
site nor the plan, — not so much indeed as we know 
about a villa of the brother Quintus, not far away, 
the building of which is described with such exact- 
ness in a letter written to the absent owner,^ that 
Schmidt thinks himself justified in applying it by 

^ de Legibus, ii. 1. 

2 op. cit. p. 15. I am assured by a travelling friend that the Fibreno 
is a delicious stream. ^ ad Quint. Fratr. ill. 1. 



254 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

analogy to the Adlla of the elder brother. But such 
reasoning is hardly safe. What we do know about 
the old house is that it was originally a true villa 
rustica, — a house with land cultivated by the owner, 
that Cicero's father, who had weak health and literary 
tastes, had added to it considerably, and that Cicero 
himself had made it into a comfortable country resi- 
dence, with all necessary conveniences. He did not 
farm the ancestral land attached to it, either himself or 
by a bailiff, but let it in small holdings ^ {praediola)^ 
and we could wish that he had told us something of 
his tenants and what they did with the land. It was 
not, therefore, a real farmhouse, but a farmhouse made 
into a pleasant residence, like so many manor-houses 
still to be seen in England. Its atrium had no doubt 
retired (so to speak) into the rear of the building, 
and had become a kitchen, and you entered, as in 
most country-houses of this period, through a vesti- 
bule directly into a peristyle : some idea of such an 
arrangement may be gained from the accompanying 
ground-plan of the villa of Diomedes just outside 
Pompeii, which was a city house adapted to rural 
conditions (villa pseudurbana).^ 

If Cicero wished to leave Arpinum for one of 
his villas on the Campanian coast, he would simply 
have to follow the valley of the Liris until it reached 
the sea between Minturnae and Formiae, and at 

^ ad Att. xiii. 19. 2. 

^ For farther details of the amenities of the villa at Arpinum see 
Schmidt, op, cit. 



VIII HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 255 




Plan op the Villa op Diomedes. From Mau's Pompeii. 



\. Steps. 

8. Peristyle. 

8. Tablinum. 
10. Exedra. 
12. Dining-room. 

14. Sleeping-room, with anteroom (13). 

15. Passage leading to a garden at the level 

of the street. 

17. Small court, with hearth (e) and 

swimming tank (f). 

18. Store-room. 



19-21. Bath. (19. Apodyterium. 20. 
Tepidarium. 21. Caldarium.) 
22. Kitchen. 

26. Colonnade, facing a terrace (28) 
over the front rooms of the 
lower part. 
e, /, g, Ti. Colonnade enclosing a large 

garden. 
i, k, I, m. Rooms. 

r. Fish-pond, 
s. Arbour. 



256 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the latter place, a lively little town with charming 
views over the sea, close to the modern Gaeta, he 
would find another house of his own, — the next he 
added to his possessions after he inherited Arpinum. 
Formiae was a very convenient spot ; it lay on the 
via Appia, and was thus in direct communication 
both with Rome and the bay of Naples, either by 
land or sea. "When Cicero is not resting, but on the 
move or expecting to be disturbed, he is often to be 
found at Formiae, as in the critical mid-winter of 
50-49 B.C. ; and here at the end of March 49 he had 
his famous interview with Caesar, who urged him in 
vain to accompany him to Rome. Here he spent 
the last weary days of his life, and here he was 
murdered by Antony's ruffians on December 7, 43. 

This villa was in or close to the little town, and 
therefore did not give him the quiet he hked to have 
for literary work. It would seem that the hore 
existed elsewhere than at Rome ; for in a short letter 
written from Formiae in April 59, he tells Atticus of 
his troubles of this kind : " As to literary work, it is 
impossible I My house is a basilica rather than a 
villa, owing to the crowds of visitors from Formiae. 
. . . C. Arrius is my next door neighbour, or rather 
he almost lives in my house, and even declares that 
his reason for not going to Rome is that he may 
spend whole days with me here philosophising. And 
then, if you please, on the other flank is Sebosus, that 
friend of Catulus ! Which way am I to turn ? I 
declare that I would go at once to Arpinum, if this 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 257 

were not the most convenient place to await your 
visit : but I will only wait till May 6 : you see what 
bores are pestering my poor ears." ^ 

But his Campanian villas would be almost as 
easy to reach as Arpinum, if he wished to escape 
from Formiae and its bores. To the nearest of these, 
the one at or near Cumae, it was only about forty 
miles' drive along the coast road, past Minturnae, 
Sinuessa, and Volturnum, all familiar halting-places. 
Of this " Cumanum," however, we know very little : 
that volcanic region has undergone such changes that 
we cannot recover the site, and its owner never seems 
to have felt any particular attachment to it. It 
was in fact too near Baiae and Bauli to suit a quiet 
literary man ; the great nobles in their vast luxurious 
palaces were too close at hand for a novus homo to 
be perfectly at his ease there. Yet near the end of 
his life Cicero added to his possessions another 
property in this neighbourhood, at or near Puteoli, 
which was now fast becoming a city of great im- 
portance ; but this can be explained by the fact that 
j a banker of Puteoli named Cluvius, an old friend of 
I his, had just died and divided his property by will 
I between Caesar and Cicero, — truly a tremendous 
I will ! Cicero seems to have purchased Caesar's share, 
•: and to have looked on the property as a good 
investment. He began to build a villa here, but had 
little chance of using it. It may have been here that 
he entertained Caesar and his retinue at the end of 

^ ad Att. ii. 14 and 15. 



258 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the year 45,^ as described by him in the famous letter 
of December 21 (ad Att, xiii. 52) ; when two thousand 
men had somehow to be provided for, and in spite 
of literary conversation, Cicero could write that his 
guest was not exactly one whom you would be in a 
hurry to see again. 

Across the bay, and just within view from the 
higher ground between Baiae and Cumae, lay the 
little town of Pompeii, under the sleeping Vesuvius. 
Here, probably just outside the town, Cicero had 
a villa of which he seems to have been really 
fond, and the society of a quiet and gentle friend, 
M. Marius. Whether we can find the remains of this 
villa among the excavations of Pompeii is very 
doubtful : but our excellent guide Schmidt assures us 
that he has good reason for believing that one 
particular house, just outside the city on the left side 
of the road in front of the Porta Herculanea, which 
has for no very convincing reason ever since its 
excavation in 1763 been called the Villa di Cicerone, 
really is the house we wish it to be. But alas ! an 
honest man must confess that the identification wants 
certainty, and the chance of finding any object or 
inscription which may confirm it is now very small. 

If Cicero were summoned suddenly back to Rome 
for business, forensic or political, he would hasten first 
to Formiae and sleep there, and thence hurry, by the 
via Appia and the route so well known to us from 

^ O. E. Schmidt, Briefwechsel Cicero's, pp. 66 and 464 ; but see his Cicero's 
Villen, p. 46, note. 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 259 

Horace's journey to Brundisium, to another house in 
the little sea-coast town of Antium. This was his 
nearest seaside residence, and he often used it when 
unable to go far from Eome. After the death of his 
daughter in 45 he seems to have sold this house to 
Lepidus, and, unable to stay at Tusculum, where she 
died, he bought a small villa on a little islet called 
Astura, on the very edge of the Pomptine marshes, 
and in that melancholy and unwholesome neighbour- 
hood he passed whole days in the woods giving way 
to his grief Yet it was a "locus amoenus, et in 
mari ipso, qui et Antio et Circeiis aspici possit." ^ It 
suited his mood, and here he stayed long, writing 
letter after letter to Atticus about the erection of a 
shrine to the lost one in some gardens to be purchased 
near Eome. 

This sketch of the country-houses of a man like 
Cicero may help us to form some idea of the changeful 
life of a great personage of the period. He did not 
look for the formation of steady permanent habits in 
any one place or house ; from an early age he was 
accustomed to travel, going to Greece or Asia Minor 
for his " higher education," acting perhaps as quaestor, 
and again as praetor or consul, in some province, 
then returning to Rome only to leave it for one or 
other of his villas, and rarely settling down in 
one of these for any length of time. It was not 
altogether a wholesome life, so far as the mind was 
concerned; real thought, the working out of great 

^ ad Att. xii. 19 init. 



26o SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

problems of philosophy or politics, is impossible 
under constant change of scene, and without the 
opportunity of forming regular habits.^ And the 
fact is that no man at this time seriously set him- 
self to think out such problems. Cicero would 
arrive at Tusculum or Arpinum with some necessary 
books, and borrowing others as best he could, would 
sit down to write a treatise on ethics or rhetoric 
with amazing speed, having an original Greek author 
constantly before him. At places like Baiae serious 
work was of course impossible, and would have been 
ridiculed. There was no original thinker in this age. 
Caesar himself was probably more suited by nature 
to reason on facts immediately before him than to 
speculate on abstract principles. Varro, the rough 
sensible scholar of Sabine descent, was a diligent 
collector of facts and traditions, but no more able to 
grapple hard with problems of philosophy or theology 
than any other Eoman of his time. The life of the 
average wealthy man was too comfortable, too change- 
able, to suggest the desirability of real mental exertion. 
Nor has this hfe any direct relation to material 
usefulness and the productive investment of capital. 
Cicero and his correspondents never mention farming, 
never betray any interest in the new movement, if 
such there was, for the scientific cultivation of the 
vine and olive. ^ For such things we must go to 

^ See Seneca, Epist. 69, on the disturbing influence of constant change of 
scene. 

2 There is an exception in the young Cicero's letter to Tiro, translated 
above, p. 202. 

i 

I 



vm HOUSE OF THE RICH MAN 261 

Varro's treatise, written, some years after Cicero's 
death, in his extreme old age. In the third book 
of that invaluable work we shall find all we want 
to know about the real villa rustica of the time, — 
the working farm-house with its wine- vats and olive- 
mills, like that recently excavated at Boscoreale near 
Pompeii. Yet it would be unfair to such men as 
Cicero and his friends, the wiser and quieter section of 
the aristocracy, to call their work altogether unpro- 
ductive. True, it left little permanent impress on 
human modes of thought ; it wrought no material 
change for the better in Italy or the Empire. We 
may go so far as to allow that it initiated that habit 
of dilettantism which we find already exaggerated in 
the age lately illuminated for us by Professor Dill in 
his book on Roman Society from Nero to Marcus 
Aurelius, and far more exaggerated in the last age 
of Roman society, which the same author has depicted 
in his earlier work. But it may be doubted whether 
under any circumstances the Romans could have 
produced a great prophet or a great philosopher; 
and the most valuable work they did was of another 
kind. It lay in the humanisation of society by the 
rational development of law, and by the communica- 
tion of Greek thought and literature to the western 
world. This was what occupied the best days of 
Cicero and Sulpicius Rufus and many others ; and 
they succeeded at the same time in creating for its 
expression one of the most perfect prose languages 
that the world has ever known or will know. They 



262 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap, vm 

did it too, helping each other by kindly and cheer- 
ing intercourse, — the humanitas of daily life. It is 
exactly this humanitas that the northern mind of 
Mommsen, in spite of its vein of passionate romance, 
could not understand; all the softer side of that 
pleasant existence among the villas and statues and 
libraries was to him simply contemptible. Let us 
hope that he has done no permanent damage to the 
credit of Cicero, and of the many lesser men who lived 
the same honourable and elegant life. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE DAILY LIFE OF THE WELL-TO-DO 

Before giving some account of the way in which a 
Roman of consideration spent his day in the time of 
Cicero, it seems necessary to explain briefly how he 
reckoned the divisions of the day. 

The old Latin farmer knew nothing of hours or 
clocks. He simply went about his daily work with 
the sun and the light as guides, rising at or before 
sunrise, working till noon, and, after a meal and a 
rest, resuming his work till sunset. This simple 
method of reckoning would suffice in a sunny 
climate, even when life and business became more 
complicated; and it is a fact that the division of 
the day into hours was not known at Rome until 
the introduction of the sun-dial in 263 B.c.^ We may 
well find it hard to understand how such business 
as the meeting of the senate, of the comitia, or the 
exercitus, could have been fixed to particular times 
under such circumstances ; perhaps the best way of 
explaining it is by noting that the Romans were very 
early in their habits, and that sunrise is a point of 

1 Censorinus, Be die natali, 23. 6. ; Pliny, N.E. vii. 213. On the whole 
subject of the division of the day see Marquardt, PrivatUlen, p. 246 foil. 

263 



264 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

time about which there can be no mistake.^ But in 
any case the date of the introduction of the sun-dial, 
which almost exactly corresponds with the beginning 
of the Punic wars and the vast increase of civil 
business arising out of them, may suggest at once 
the primitive condition of the old Eoman mind and 
habit, and the way in which the Eomans had to learn 
from other peoples how to save and arrange the time 
that was beginning to be so precious. 

This first sun-dial came from Catina in Sicily, and 
was therefore quite unsuited to indicate the hours at 
Rome. Nevertheless Rome contrived to do with it 
until nearly a century had elapsed ; at last, in 159 B.C., 
a dial calculated on the latitude of Rome was placed 
by the side of it by the censor Q. Marcius Philippus. 
These two dials were fixed on pillars behind the 
Rostra in the Forum, the most convenient place for 
regulating public business, and there they remained 
even in the time of Cicero.^ But in the censorship 
next following that of Philippus the first water-clock 
was introduced ; this indicated the hours both of day 
and night, and enabled every one to mark the exact 
time even on cloudy days.^ 

Thus from the time of the Punic wars the city popu- 
lation reckoned time by hours, i.e. twelve divisions 
of the day ; but as they continued to reckon the day 

^ In the XII Tables only sunrise and sunset were mentioned (Pliny, I.e. 
212). Later on noon was proclaimed by tbe Consul's marshal (Varro, de Ling. 
Lot. vi. 5), and also the end of the civil day. Cp. Varro, L.L. vi. 89. 

^ Cic. pro Quinctio, 18. 59. 

^ See the article "Horologium" in Diet, of Antiquities, vol. i. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 265 

from sunrise to sunset on the principle of the old 
agricultural practice, these twelve hours varied in 
length at different times of the year. In mid-winter 
the hours were only about forty -four minutes in 
length, while at mid-summer they were about seventy- 
five, and they corresponded with ours only at the two 
equinoxes/ This, of course, made the construction 
of accurate dials and water-clocks a matter of con- 
siderable difficulty. It is not necessary here to explain 
how the difficulties were overcome ; the reader may 
be referred to the article " Horologium " in the 
Dictionary of Antiquities, and especially to the 
cuts there given of the dial found at Tusculum 
in 1761.' 

Sun-dials, once introduced with the proper reckon- 
ing for latitude, soon came into general use, and a 
considerable number still survive which have been 
found in Eome. In a fragment of a comedy by an 
unknown author, ascribed to the last century B.C., 
Rome is described as " full of sun-dials," ^ and many 
have been discovered in other Eoman towns, including 

^ Our modern hours are called equinoctial, because they are fixed at the 
length of the natural hour at the equinoxes. This system does not seem 
to have come in until late in the Empire period. 

^ For the water-clock see Marquardt, op. cit. p. 773 foil. 
^ The lines are so good that I may venture to quote them in full from 
GeU. iii. 3 (cp. Ribbeck, Fragm. Comicorum,, ii. p. 34) : " parasitus esuriens 
dicit : 

Ut ilium di perdant primus qui horas repperit, 
Quique adeo primus statuit hie solarium. 
Qui mihi comminuit misero articulatim diem, 
Nam olim me puero venter erat solarium, 
Multo omnium istorum optimum et verissimum : 



266 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

several at Pompeii. But for the ordinary Roman, 
who possessed no sun-dial or was not within reach of 
one, the day fell into four convenient divisions, as 
with us it falls into three, — morning, afternoon, and 
evening. As they rose much earher than we do, 
the hours up to noon were divided into two parts : 
(1) mane, or morning, which lasted from sunrise to 
the beginning of the third hour, and (2) ad meridiem, 
or forenoon ; then followed de meridie, i.e. afternoon, 
and suprema, from about the ninth or tenth hour 
till sunset. The authority for these handy divisions 
is Censorinus, De die natali (23. 9, 24. 3). There 
seems to be no doubt that they originated in the 
management of civil business, and especially in that 
of the praetor's court, which normally began at the 
third hour, i.e. the beginning of ad meridiem, and 
went on till the suprema (tempest as diei), which 
originally meant sunset, but by a lex Plaetoria 
was extended to include the hour or two before 
dark. 

The first thing to note in studying the daily life at 
Rome is that the Romans, Hke the Greeks, were busy 
much earlier in the morning than we are. In part 
this was the result of their comfortable southern 
climate, where the nights are never so long as with 

Ubivis ste monebat esse, nisi quom nihil erat. 
Nunc etiam quom est, non estur, nisi soli libet. 
Itaque adeo iam oppletum oppidum est solariis, 
Maior pars populi iam aridi reptant fame." 

The fourth line contains a truth of human nature, of which illustrations 
might easily be found at the present day. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 267 

us, and where the early mornings are not so chilly 
and damp in summer or so cold in winter. But it 
was probably still more the effect of the very imper- 
fect lighting of houses, which made it difficult to 
carry on work, especially reading and writing, after 
dark, and suggested early retirement to bed and 
early rising in the morning. The streets, we must 
remember, were not lighted except on great occa- 
sions, and it was not till late in Eoman history that 
public places and entertainments could be frequented 
after dark. In early times the oil-lamp with a wick 
was unknown, and private houses were lighted by 
torches and rude candles of wax or tallow.^ The 
introduction of the use of olive oil, which was first 
imported from Greece and the East and then pro- 
duced in Italy, brought with it the manufacture of 
lamps of various kinds, great and small ; and as the 
cultivation of the valuable tree, so easily grown in 
Italy, increased in the last century b.c.,^ the oil-lamp 
became universal in houses, baths, etc. Even in the 
small old baths of Pompeii there were found about 
a thousand lamps, obviously used for illumination 
after dark.^ But in spite of this and of the inven- 
tion of candelabra for extending the use of candles, 
it was never possible for the Eoman to turn night 
into day as we do in our modern town -life. We 
must look on the lighting of the streets as quite an 

^ Pliny, N.H. xv. 1 foil, supplies the history of the oil industry. For 
the candles see Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 690. 

^ See ahove, p. 93. ' Marq. Privatleben, p. 264. 



268 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

exceptional event. This happened, for example, on 
the night of the famous fifth of December 63 B.C., 
when Cicero returned to his house after the execution 
of the conspirators ; people placed lamps and torches 
at their doors, and women showed lights from the 
roofs of the houses. 

An industrious man, especially in winter, when 
this want of artificial light made time most valu- 
able, would often begin, his work before daylight ; he 
might have a speech to prepare for the senate, or a 
brief for a trial, or letters to write, and, as we shall 
see, as soon as the sun had well risen it was not 
likely that he would be altogether his own master. 
Thus we find Cicero on a February morning writing 
to his brother before sunrise,^ and it is not unlikely 
that the soreness of the eyes of which he sometimes 
complains may have been the result of reading and 
writing before the light was good. In his country 
villas he could do as he liked, but at Rome he knew 
that he would have the "turba salutantium" upon him 
as soon as the sun had risen. Cicero is the only man 
of his own time of whose habits we know much, but 
in the next generation Horace describes himself as 
calling for pen and paper before daylight, and later 
on that insatiable student the elder Pliny would 
work for hours before daylight, and then go to the 
Emperor Vespasian, who was also a very early riser. ^ 
After sunrise the whole population was astir; boys 

* Cic. ad Q.F. ii. 3. 7. For the lippitudo, ad Att. vii. 14. 
s Hot. Epist. ii. 1. 112 ; Pliny, Ep. iii. 5, 8, 9. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 269 

were on their way to school, and artisans to their 
labour. 

If Horace is not exaggerating when he says (Sat. 
i. 1. 10) that the barrister might be disturbed by a 
client at cock-crow, Cicero's studies may have been 
interrupted even before the crowds came ; but this 
could hardly happen often. As a rule it was during 
the first two hours (mane) that callers collected. In 
the old times it had been the custom to open your 
house and begin your business at daybreak, and after 
saluting your familia and asking a blessing of the 
household gods, to attend to your own affairs and 
those of your clients.^ Although we are not told so 
explicitly, we must suppose that the same practice 
held good in Cicero's time ; under the Empire it is 
familiar to all readers of Seneca or Martial, but in a 
form which was open to much criticism and satire. 
The client of the Empire was a degraded being ; of 
the client in the last age of the Republic we only 
know that he existed, and could be useful to his 
patronus in many ways, — in elections and trials 
especially ; ^ but we do not hear of his pressing 
himself on the attention of his patron every morn- 
ing, or receiving any " sportula." All the same, the 
number of persons, whether clients in this sense or 

^ Hor. I^ist. ii. 1. 103 : "Romae dulce diu fuit et solenne reclusa Mano 
domo vigilare, clienti promere iura " etc. It is curious that all our informa- 
tion on this early business comes from the literature of the Empire. The 
single passage of Cicero which Marquardt could find to illustrate it unluckily 
relates to his practice as governor of Cilicia {ad Att. vi. 2. 5). 

* e.g. ad Q.F. i. 2. 16. ; and Q. Cic. Commentariolum petitionis, sec. 17. 



270 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

in the legal sense, or messengers, men of business, 
and ordinary callers, who would want to see a man 
like Cicero before he leffc his house in the morning, 
would beyond doubt be considerable. Otherwise 
they would have to catch him in the street or 
Forum ; and though occasionally a man of note 
might purposely walk in public in order to give 
his clients their chance, Cicero makes it plain that 
this was not his way.^ 

Within these two first hours of daylight the busy 
man had to find time for a morning meal ; the idle 
man, who slept later, might postpone it. This early 
breakfast, called ientaculum,^ answered to the " coff'ee 
and roll" which is usual at the present day in all 
European countries except our own, and which is 
fully capable of supporting even a hard-working 
man for several hours. It is, indeed, quite possible 
to do work before this breakfast ; Antiochus, the 
great doctor, is said by Galen to have visited such 
of his patients as lived near him before his breakfast 
and on foot.^ But as a rule the meal was taken 
before a busy man went out to his work, and 
consisted of bread, either dipped in wine or eaten 
with honey, olives, or cheese. The breakfast of 

^ See what he says of M'. Manilius in De Oral, iii. 133. 

^ The word seems to be connected with ieiunium (Plant. Gureulio I. i. 
73 ; Festus, p. 346), and thus answers to our break/as^. The verb is ientare : 
Afranius : fragm. "ientare nulla invitat." 

" Galen, vol. vi. p. 332. I take this citation from Marquardt, Privatlehen, 
p. 257 ; others will be found in the notes to that page. Marquardt seems 
to have been the first to bring the evidence of the medical writers to bear 
on the subject of Roman meals. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 271 

Antiochus consisted, for example, of bread and Attic 
honey. 

The meal over, the man of politics or business 
would leave his house, outside which his clients and 
friends or other hangers-on would be waiting for him, 
and proceed to the Forum, — the centre, as we have 
seen, of all his activity — accompanied by these 
people in a kind of procession. Some would go 
before to make room for him, while others followed 
him ; if bent on election business, he would have 
experienced helpers,^ either volunteers or in his pay, 
to save him from making blunders as to names and 
personalities, and in fact to serve him in conducting 
himself towards the populace with the indispensable 
hlanditia.^ Every Roman of importance liked to 
have, and usually had, a train of followers or friends 
in descending to the Forum of a morning from his 
house, or in going about other public business ; what 
Q. Cicero urges on his brother in canvassing for the 
consulship may hold good in principle for all the public 
appearances of a public man, — " I press this strongly 
on you, always to be with a multitude." ^ It may 
perhaps be paralleled with the love of the Roman 
for processions, e.g. the lustrations of farm, city, 
and army,^ and with his instinctive desire for aid 
and counsel in all important matters both of public 
and private life, shown in the consilium of the 

^ See the interesting account of these (salutatores, deductores, assecta- 
tores) in the Commentariolum petitionis of Q. Cicero, 9. 34 foil. 

* See above, p. 109. ^ Q. Cicero, Comment. Pet. 9. 37. 

* See the author's Roman Festivals, pp. 125 foil. 



272 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

paterfamilias and of the magistrate. Examples are 
easy to find in tlie literature of this period ; an ex- 
cellent one is the graphic picture of Gaius Gracchus 
and his train of followers, which Plutarch has pre- 
served from a contemporary writer. " The -people 
looked with admiration on him, seeing him attended 
by crowds of building-contractors, artificers, ambas- 
sadors, magistrates, soldiers, and learned men, to all 
of whom he was easy of access ; while he maintained 
his dignity, he was gracious to all, and suited his 
behaviour to the condition of every individual ; thus 
he proved the falsehood of those who called him 
tyrannical or arrogant." ^ 

Arrived at the Forum, if not engaged in a trial, 
or summoned to a meeting of the senate, or busy 
in canvassing, he would mingle with the crowd, and 
spend a social morning in meeting and talking with 
friends, or in hearing the latest news from the 
provinces, or in occupying himself with his invest- 
ments with the aid of his bankers and agents. This 
is the way in which such a sociable and agreeable 
man as Cicero was loved to spend his mornings 
when not deep in the composition of some speech 
or book, — and at Rome it was indeed hardly possible 
for him to find the time for steady literary work. It 
was this social life that he longed for when in Cilicia ; 
" one little walk and talk with you," he could write 
to Caelius at Rome, "is worth all the profits of a 
province." ^ But it was also this crowded and talka- 

^ Plutarch, C. Gracchus, 6. ^ Cic. ad Fam. ii. 12. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 273 

tive Forum that Lucilius could describe in a passage 
already quoted, as teeming with, men who, with the 
aid of hypocrisy and blanditia, spent the day from 
morning till night in trying to get the better of their 
fellows.^ 

After a morning spent in the Forum, our Roman 
might return home in time for his lunch (prandium), 
which had taken the place of the early dinner {cena) 
of the olden time. Exactly the same thing affected 
the hours of these meals as has affected those of our 
own within the last century or so ; the great increase 
of public business of all kinds has with us pushed 
the time of the chief meal later and later, and so it 
was at Rome. The senate had an immense amount 
of business to transact in the two last centuries B.C., 
and the increase in oratorical skill, as well as the 
growing desire to talk in public, extended its sittings 
sometimes till nightfall.^ So too with the law-courts, 
which had become the scenes of oratorical display, 
and often of that indulgence in personal abuse which 
has great attractions for idle people fond of excite- 
ment. Thus the dinner hour had come to be post- 
poned from about noon to the ninth or even the 
tenth hour,^ and some kind of a lunch was necessary. 
We do not hear much of this meal, which was in fact 
for most men little more than the "snack" which 

^ Fragm. 9. Baehrens, Fragm. Poet. Rom. p. 141. Cp. Galen, vol. x. p. 3 
(Kuhn). 

2 Livy xlv. 36 ; Cic. ad Fam. i. 2 ; for a famous case of "obstruction" 
by lengthy speaking, Gell. iv. 10. 

^ Festus, p. 54. 

T 



274 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

London men of business will take standing at a bar ; 
nor do we know wbetber senators and barristers took 
it as they sat in the curia or in court, or whether 
there was an adjournment for purposes of refreshment. 
Such an adjournment seems to have taken place, 
occasionally at least, during the games under the 
Empire, for Suetonius {Claud. 34) tells us that 
Claudius would dismiss the people to take their 
prandium and yet remain himself in his seat. A 
joke of Cicero's about Caninius E-ebilus, who was 
appointed consul by Caesar on the last day of the 
year 45 at one o'clock, shows that the usual hour 
for the prandium was about noon or earlier ; " under 
the consulship of Caninius," he wrote to Curius, " no 
one ever took luncheon." ^ 

After the prandium, if a man were at home and 
at leisure, followed the siesta (meridiatio). This is 
the universal habit in all southern climates, especially 
in summer, and indeed, if the mind and body are 
active from an early hour, a little repose is useful, 
if not necessary, after mid -day. Busy men how- 
ever like Cicero could not always afford it in the 
city, and we find him noting near the end of his 
life, when Caesar's absolutism had diminished the 
amount of his work both in senate and law-courts, 
that he had taken to the siesta which he formerly 
dispensed with.^ Even the sturdy Varro in his old 
age declared that in summer he could not possibly 

^ ad Fam. vii. 30, 
2 de Bivinatione, ii. 142, written in 44 B.c. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 275 

do without his nap in the middle of the day.* On 
the other hand, in the famous letter in which Cicero 
describes his entertainment of Caesar in mid-winter 
45 B.C., nothing is said of a siesta; the Dictator 
worked till after mid-day, then walked on the shore, 
and returned, not for a nap but for a bath.^ 

Caesar, as he was Cicero's guest, must have taken 
his bath in the villa, probably that at Cumae (see 
above, p. 257). Most well-appointed private houses 
had by this time a bath-room or set of bath-rooms, 
providing every accommodation, according to the 
season and the taste of the bather. This was indeed 
a modern improvement ; in the old days the Eomans 
only washed their arms and legs daily, and took a 
bath every market-day, i.e. every ninth day. This is 
told us in an amusing letter of Seneca's, who also 
gives a description of the bath in the villa of the 
elder Scipio at Liternum, which consisted of a single 
room without a window, and was supplied with water 
which was often thick after raiu.^ " Nesciit vivere," 
says Seneca, in ironical allusion to the luxury of his 
own day. In Cicero's time every villa doubtless had 
its set of baths, with at least three rooms, — the 
apodyterium, caldarium, and tepidarium, sometimes 
also an open swimming-bath, as in the House of the 

* Varro, H.B, i. 2 ; the words are put into the mouth of one of the 
speakers in the dialogue. See, for examples from later writers, Marq., 
Privatleben, p. 262. 

^ ad Att. xiii. 52 ; the habit may have often been dropped in winter. 

' Seneca, Ep. 86, The whole passage is most interesting, as illustrating 
the difference in habits wrought in the course of two centuries. 



276 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Silver Wedding at Pompeii.^ In Cicero's letter to 
his brother about the villa at Arcanum, he mentions 
the dressing-room (apodyterium) and the caldarium 
or hot-air chamber, and doubtless there were others. 
Even in the villa rustica of Boscoreale near Pompeii, 
which was a working farm-house, we find the bath- 
rooms complete, provided, that is, with the three 
essentials of dressing-room, tepid-room, and hot-air 
room.^ Caesar probably, as it was winter, used the 
last of these, took in fact a Turkish bath, as we should 
call it, and then went into a tepidarium, where, as 
Cicero tells us, he received some messenger. Here 
he was anointed (unctus), i.e. rubbed dry from per- 
spiration, with a strigil on which oil was dropped 
to soften its action.^ When this operation was over, 
about the ninth hour, which in mid-winter would 
begin about half-past one, he was ready for the 
dinner which followed immediately.* 

1 Mau, Pompeii, p. 300. See above, p. 244. 

2 See the plan in Mau, p. 357 ; Marquardt, Privatleben, p. 272. 

^ See Professor Purser's explanation and illustrations in the Diet, of 
Antiquities, vol. i. p. 278. 

* The subject of the public baths at Rome properly belongs to the period 
of the Empire, and is too extensive to be treated in a chapter on the daily 
life of the Roman of Cicero's time. Public baths did exist in Rome already, 
but we hear very little of them, which shows that they were not as yet an 
indispensable adjunct of social life ; but the fact that Seneca in the letter 
already quoted describes the aediles as testing the heat of the water with 
their hands shows (1) that the baths were public, (2) that they were of hot 
water and not, as later, of hot air (thermae). The latter invention is said to 
have come in before the Social war (Val. Max. ix. 1. 1.). Some baths seem 
to have been run as a speculation by private individuals, and bore the 
name of their builder (e.g. balneae Seniae, Cic. pro Cael. 25. 61). In 
summer the young men still bathed in the Tiber {pro Cael. 15. 36). At 



DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 277 

This we may take as the ordinary winter dinner- 
hour in the country ; in summer it would be an 
hour or so later. In an amusing story given as a 
rhetorical illustration in the work known as Rhetorica 
ad Uerennium, iv. 63, the guests (doomed never to 
get their dinner that day except in an inn) are invited 
for the tenth hour. But in the city it must have 
often happened that the hour was later, owing to the 
press of business. For example, on one occasion when 
the senate had been sitting ad noctem, Cicero dines with 
Pompeius after its dismissal (ad Fam. i. 2. 3). Another 
day we find him going to bed after his dinner, and 
clearly not for a siesta, which, as we saw, he never 
had time to take in his busy days ; this, however, was 
not actually in Rome but in his villa at Formiae, 
where he was at that time liable to much interrup- 
tion from callers (ad Att. ii. 16). Probably, like most 
Romans of his day, he had spent a long time over his 
dinner, talking if he had guests, or reading and 
thinking if he were alone or with his family only. 

The dinner, cena, was in fact the principal private 
event of the day ; it came when all business was 
over, and you could enjoy the privacy of family life 
or see your friends and unbend with them. At no 
other meal do we hear of entertainment, unless the 
guests were on a journey, as was the case at the 
lunch at Arcanum when Pomponia's temper got 
the better of her (see above, p. 52). Even dinner- 
Pompeii the oldest public baths (the Stabian ; Mau, p. 183) date from the 
second century b. c. 



278 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

parties seem to have come into fashion only since 
the Punic wars, with later hours and a larger staff 
of slaves to cook and wait at table. In the old days 
of household simplicity the meals were taken in the 
atrium, the husband reclining on a lectus,^ the wife 
sitting by his side, and the children sitting on stools 
in front of them. The slaves too in the olden time 
took their meal sitting on benches in the atrium, so 
that the whole familia was present. This means that 
the dinner was in those days only a necessary break 
in the intervals of work, and the sitting posture was 
always retained for slaves, i.e. those who would go 
about their work as soon as the meal was over. 
Columella, writing under the early Empire, urges 
that the vilicus or overseer should sit at his dinner 
except on festivals ; and Cato the younger would 
not recline after the battle of Pharsalia for the rest 
of his life, apparently as a sign that life was no longer 
enjoyable.^ 

But after the Second Punic war, which changed the 
habits of the Roman in so many ways, the atrium 
ceased to be the common dining-place, and special 
chambers were built, either off the atrium or in the 
interior part of the house about the peristylium, or 
even upstairs, for the accommodation of guests, who 
might be received in different rooms, according to the 
season and the weather.^ These triclinia were so 

^ The tradition was that the paterfamilias originally , also sat instead of 
reclining. See Marq. Privatleben, p. 292 note 3. 

^ Columella, ii. 1. 19, a very interesting chapter ; Plutarch, Cato min, 56. 
^ Plut. LucuUus 40 ; see above, p. 242. 



DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 279 



arranged as to afford the greatest personal comfort 
and tlie best opportunities for conversation ; they 
indicate clearly that dinner is no longer an interval 
in the day's work, but a time of repose and ease at 
the end of it. The plan here given of a triclinium, as 
described by Plutarch in his Quaestiones conviviales, 

Lectus medius. 




Plan op a Triclinium. 

will show this sufficiently without elaborate descrip- 
tion ; but it is necessary to notice that the host 
always or almost always occupied the couch marked 
H on the plan, while the one immediately above him, 
i.e. No. 3 of the lectus medius , was reserved for the 
most important guest, and called lectus consularis. 
Plutarch's account, and a little consideration, will 
show that the host was thus well placed for the 
superintendence of the meal, as well as for conversa- 
tion with his distinguished guest ; and that the latter 



28o SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

occupied what Plutarch calls a free corner, so that any 
messengers or other persons needing to see him could 
get access to him without disturbing the party. ^ 
The number that could be accommodated, nine, was 
not only a sacred and lucky one, but exactly suited 
for convenience of conversation and attendance. 
Larger parties were not unheard of, even under the 
Eepublic, and Vitruvius tells us that some dining- 
rooms were fitted with three or more triclinia ; but to 
put more than three guests on a single couch, and so 
increase the number, was not thought courteous or 
well-bred. Among the points of bad breeding which 
Cicero attributes to his enemy Calpurnius Piso, the 
consul of 58, one was that he put five guests to 
recline on a single couch, while himself occupying one 
alone ; so Horace : 

Saepe tribus lectis videas cenare quaternos.2 

As the guests were made so comfortable, it may 
be supposed that they were not in a hurry to depart ; 
the mere fact that they were reclining instead of 
sitting would naturally dispose them to stay. The 
triclinia were open at one end, i.e. not shut up as 
our dining-rooms are, and the air would not get close 
and " dinnery." Cicero describes old Cato ^ (no doubt 
from some passage in Cato's writings) as remaining 
in conversation at dinner until late at night. The 
guests would arrive with their slaves, who took off 

^ Plut. Quaest. Conv. 1. 3 foil. ; and Marq. p. 295. 

' Hor. Sat. i. 4. 86 ; cp. Cic. in Pisonem, 27. 67. 

8 Cic. de SenecL 14. 46, 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 281 

their walking shoes, if they had come on foot, and 
put on their sandals {soleae) : each wore a festive 
dress {synthesis), of Greek origin like the other 
features of the entertainment, and there was no 
question of changing these again in a hurry. Nothing 
can better show the difference between the old Roman 
manners and the new than the character of these 
parties ; they are the leisurely and comfortable 
rendezvous of an opulent and educated society, in 
which politics, literature or philosophy could be dis- 
cussed with much self-satisfaction. That such dis- 
cussion did not go too deeply into hard questions was 
perhaps the result of the comfort. 

There was of course another side to this picture 
of the evening of a Roman gentleman. There was 
a coarse side to the Roman character, and in the 
age when wealth, the slave trade, and idle habits 
encouraged self-indulgence, meals were apt to become 
ends in themselves instead of necessary aids to a 
wholesome life. The ordinary three parts or courses 
(mensae) of a dinner, — the gustatio or light preliminary 
course, the cena proper, with substantial dishes, and 
the dessert of pastry and fruit, could be amplified 
and extended to an unlimited extent by the skill of 
the slave-cooks brought from Greece and the East 
(see above, p. 209) ; the gourmand had appeared long 
before the age of Cicero and had been already satirised 
by Lucilius and Varro.^ Splendid dinner-services 

1 Lucilius, fragm. 30 ; 120 foil. ; 168, 327 etc. Varro wrote a Menippean 
satire on gluttony, of which a fragment is preserved by Gellius, vi. 16. 



282 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

might take the place of the old simple ware, and 
luxurious drapery and rugs covered the couches, 
instead of the skins of animals, as in the old time.^ 
Vulgarity and ostentation, such as Horace satirised, 
were doubtless too often to be met with. Those 
who lived for feasting and enjoyment would invite 
their company quite early in the day (tempestativum 
convivium) and carry on the revelry till midnight.^ 
And lastly, the practice of drinking wine after dinner 
(comissatio), simply for the sake of drinking, under 
fixed rules according to the Greek fashion, familiar 
to us all in the Odes of Horace, had undoubtedly 
begun some time before the end of the Republic. In 
the Actio prima of his Yerrine orations Cicero gives 
a graphic picture of a convivium beginning early, 
where the proposal was made and agreed to that the 
drinking should be " more graeco." ^ 

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that 
this kind of self-indulgence was characteristic of the 
average Roman life of this age. The ordinary student 
is liable to fall into this error because he reads his 
Horace and his Juvenal, but dips a very little way 
into Cicero's correspondence ; and he needs to be 
reminded that the satirists are not deriding the 
average life of the citizen, any more than the artists 
who make fun of the foibles of our own day in the 
pages of Punch. Cicero hardly ever mentions his 

^ See the interesting passage in Cic. pro Murena, 36. 75, about the 
funeral feast of Scipio Aemilianus. 

^ Catull. 47. 5 : " vos convivia lauta sumptuose De die facitis ?" 
^ 26. 65 foil, ; Hor. Od. iii. 19, and the commentators. 



IX DAILY LIFE OF WELL-TO-DO 283 

meals, his cookery, or his wine, even in his most 
chatty letters ; such matters did not interest him, 
and do not seem to have interested his friends, so 
far as we can judge by their letters. In one amusing 
letter to Poetus, he does indeed tell him what he 
had for dinner at a friend's house, but only by way 
of explaining that he had been very unwell from 
eating mushrooms and such dishes, which his host 
had had cooked in order not to contravene a recent 
sumptuary law/ The Letters are worth far more as 
negative evidence of the usual character of dinners 
than either the invectives (vituperationes) against 
a Piso or an Antony, or the lively wit of the 
satirists. Let us return for an instant, in conclusion, 
to that famous letter, already quoted, in which Cicero 
describes the entertainment of Caesar at Cumae in 
December, 45. It contains an expression which has 
given rise to very mistaken conclusions both about 
Caesar's own habits and those of his day. After 
telling Atticus that his guest sat down to dinner 
when the bath was over he goes on: '* 'EyLtert/c^y 
agebat; itaque et edit et bibit aSew? et iucunde, 
opipare sane et apparate, nee id solum, sed 

bene cocto 
condito, sermons bono, et si quaeri', libenter." 

Even good scholars used formerly to make the 

^ ad Fam. vii. 26, of the year 57 B.C. The sumptuary law must have 
been a certain lex AemiHa of later date than Sulla. (See Gell. ii, 24 : 
"qua lege non sumptus cenarum, sed ciborum genus et modus praefinitus 
est.") This chapter of Gellius, and Macrob. iii. 17, are the safest passages to 
consult on the subject of the growth of gourmandism. 



284 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap, ix 

mistake of supposing that Caesar, a man hiabitually 
abstemious, or at least temperate, had made up his 
mind to over-eat himself on this occasion, as he was 
intending to take an emetic afterwards. And even 
now it may be as well to point out that medical 
treatment by a course of emetics was a perfectly 
well known and valued method at this time ; ^ that 
Caesar, whose health was always delicate, and at 
this time severely tried, was then under this treat- 
ment, and could therefore eat his dinner com- 
fortably, without troubling himself about what he 
ate and drank : and that the apt quotation from 
Lucilius, and the literary conversation which (so 
Cicero adds) followed the dinner, prove beyond all 
question that this was no glutton's meal, but one of 
that ordinary and rational type, in which repose and 
pleasant intercourse counted for more than the mere 
eating and driuking. 

No more work seems to have been done after the 
cena was over and the guests had retired. We found 
Cicero on one occasion going to bed soon after the 
meal ; and, as he was up and active so early in the 
morning, we may suppose that he retired at a much 
earlier hour than we do. But of this last act of the 
day he tells us nothing. 

^ See Monro, Elucidations of Catullus, p. 92 folL 



CHAPTER X 

HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 

The Italian peoples, of all races, have always had 
a wonderful capacity for enjoying themselves out 
of doors. The Italian festa of to-day, usually, as in 
ancient times, linked to some religious festival, is a 
scene of gaiety, bright dresses, music, dancing, bon- 
fires, races, and improvisation or mummery ; and all 
that we know of the ancient rural festivals of Italy 
suggests that they were of much the same lively and 
genial character. TibuUus gives us a good idea 
of them : 

" Agricola assiduo primum satiatus aratro 

Cantavit certo rustica verba pede ; 
Et eatur arenti primum est modulatus avena 

Carmen, ut ornatos diceret ante deos ; 
Agricola et minio suffusus, Bacche, rubenti 

Primus inexperta duxit ab arte chores." * 

It would be easy to multiply examples of such 
merry-making from the poets of the Augustan age, 

' Tibull. ii. 1. 51 foil. Cp. ii. 5. 83 foil. Several are also described by 
Ovid in his Fasti. A charming account of feste in a Tuscan village of to- 
day will be found in A Nook in the Apennines, by Leader Scott, chapters 
xxviii. and xxix. : a book full of value for Italian rural life, ancient and 
modern. 

285 



286 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

nearly all of whom were born and bred in tbe country, 
and shared Virgil's tenderness for a life of honest 
work and play among the Itahan hills and valleys. 
But in this chapter we are to deal with the holidays 
and enjoyments of the great city, and the rural 
festivals are only mentioned here because almost all 
the characteristics of the urban holiday-making are 
to be found in germ there. The Roman calendar of 
festivals has its origin in the regularly recurring rites 
of the earhest Latin husbandman. As the city grew, 
these old agricultural festivities lost of course much 
of their native simphcity and naivete ; some of them 
survived merely as religious or priestly performances, 
some became degraded into licentious enjoyment ; 
but the music and dancing, the gay dresses, the 
racing, the mumming or acting, are all to be found 
in the city, developed in one form or another, from 
the earhest to the latest periods of Roman history. 

The Latin word for a holiday was feriae, a term 
which belongs to the language of religious law {ius 
divinum). Strictly speaking, it means a day which 
the citizen has resigned, either wholly or in part, to 
the service of the gods.^ As of old on the farm no 
work was to be done on such days, so in the city no- 
public business could be transacted. Cicero, drawing 
up in antique language his idea of the ius divinum, 
writes thus of feriae : " Feriis iurgia amovento, easque 
in familiis, operibus patratis, habento " : which he 

^ Wissowa, Eeligion und Kultus, p. 366. "Feriae" came in time to be 
limited to public festivals, while "festus dies" covered all holidays. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 287 

afterwards explains as meaning that the citizen must 
abstain from litigation, and the slave be excused 
from labour.^ The idea then of a holiday was much 
the same as we find expressed in the Jewish Sabbath, 
and had its root also in religious observance. But 
Cicero, whether he is actually reproducing the words 
of an old law or inventing it for himself, was certainly 
not reflecting the custom of the city in his own day ; 
no such rigid observance of a rule was possible in the 
capital of an Empire such as the Eoman had become. 
Even on the farm it had long ago been found 
necessary to make exceptions ; thus Virgil tells us : ^ 

" Quippe etiam festis qiiaedam exercere diebus 
Fas et iura sinunt : rivos deducere nulla 
Eeligio vetuit, segeti praetendere saepem, 
Insidias avibus moliri, incendere vejDres, 
Balantumque gregem fluvio mersare salubri." 

So too in the city it was simply impossible that all 
work should cease on feriae, of which there were 
more than a hundred in the year, including the Ides 
of every month and some of the Kalends and Nones. 
As a matter of fact a double change had come 
about since the city and its dominion began to 
increase rapidly about the time of the Punic wars. 
First, many of the old festivals, sacred to deities 
whose vogue was on the wane, or who had no longer 
any meaning for a city population, as being deities 
of husbandry, were almost entirely neglected : even 
if the priests performed the prescribed rites, no one 

^ de Legihus, ii. 8. 19 : cp. 12. 29. 
" Georg, i. 268 foil. Cato had already said the same thing : R.B. ii, 4. 



288 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

knew and no one cared,^ and it may be doubted 
whether the State was at all scrupulous in adhering 
to the old sacred rules as to the hours on which 
business could be transacted on such days." Secondly, 
certain festivals which retained their popularity had 
been extended from one day to three or more, in 
one or two cases, as we shall see, even to thirteen and 
fifteen days, in order to give time for an elaborate 
system of public amusement consisting of chariot- 
races and stage -plays, and known by the name of 
ludi^ or, as at the winter Saturnalia, to enable all 
classes to enjoy themselves during the short days 
for seven mornings instead of one. Obviously this 
was a much more convenient and popular arrange- 
ment than to have your holidays scattered about 
over the whole year as single days ; and it suited the 
rich and ambitious, who sought to obtain popular 
favour by shows and games on a grand scale, 
needing a succession of several days for complete 
exhibition. So the old religious word feriae be- 
comes gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public 
holiday of amusement, by the word ludi, and came 
at last to mean, as it still does in Germany, the 
holidays of schoolboys.^ These ludi will form the 
chief subject of this chapter ; but we must first 

^ Thus Ovid describes the rites performed by the Flamen Quirinalis at 
the old agricultural festival of the Robigalia (Robigus, deity of the mildew) 
as if it were a curious bit of old practice which most people knew nothing 
about. — Fasti, iv. 901 foil. 

^ Greenidge, Legal Procedure in Cicero's time, p. 457. 

* It is the same word as our /air. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 289 

mention one or two of the old feriae which seem 
always to have remained occasions of holiday-making, 
at any rate for the lower classes of the population. 

One of these occurred on the Ides of March, and 
must have been going on at the moment when Caesar 
was assassinated in 44 B.C. It was the festival of Anna 
Perenna, a mysterious old deity of " the ring of the 
year." The lower class of the population, Ovid tells 
us,^ streamed out to the " fesfcum geniale " of Anna, 
and spent the whole day in the Campus Martins, 
lying about in pairs of men and women, indulging in 
drinking and all kinds of revelry. Some lay in the 
open ; some constructed tents, or rude huts of boughs, 
stretching their togas over them for shelter. As 
they drank they prayed for as many years of life as 
they could swallow cups of wine. The usual charac- 
teristics of the Italian festa were to be found there : 
they sang anything they had picked up in the theatre, 
with much gesticulation (" et iactant faciles ad sua 
verba manus "), and they danced, the women letting 
down their long hair. The result of these perform- 
ances was naturally that they returned home in a 
state of intoxication, which roused the mirth of the 
bystanders. O^dd adds that he had himself met them 
so returning, and had seen an old woman pulling along 
an old man, both of them intoxicated. There may have 
been other popular "jollifications" of this kind, for 
example at the Neptunalia on July 23, where we find 
the same curious custom of making temporary huts 

^ Fasti, iii. 523 foil. ; Fowler, Eoman Festivals, p. 51. 

U 



290 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

or shelters ; ^ but this is tlie only one of which we 
have any account by an eye-witness. Of the famous 
Lupercalia in February, and some other festivals 
which neither died out altogether nor were con- 
verted into ludi, we only know the ritual, and 
cannot tell whether they were still used as popular 
holidays. 

One famous festival of the old religious calendar 
did, however, always remain a favourite holiday, 
viz. the Saturnalia on December 17, which was by 
common usage extended to seven days in all.^ It 
was probably the survival of a mid-winter festivity 
in the life of the farm, at a time when all the farm 
work of the autumn was over, and when both bond 
and free might indulge themselves in unlimited 
enjoyment. Such ancient customs die hard, or, as 
was the case with the Saturnalia, never die at all ; 
for the same features are still to be found in the 
Christmas rejoicings of the Italian peasant. Every 
one knows something of the character of this holi- 
day, and especially of the entertainment of slaves by 
their masters,^ which has many parallels in Greek 
custom, and has been recently supposed to have been 
borrowed from the Greeks. Various games were 
played, and among them that of " King," at which 
we have seen the young Cato playing with his boy 

* Boman Festivals, p. 185. The custom doubtless had a religious origin. 

^ Ih. p. 268. Augustus limited the days to three. 

' Wissowa, Religion und Kultus, p. 170. The cult of Saturn was largely 
affected by Greek usage, but this particular custom was more likely descended 
from the usage of the Latin farm. 



i 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 291 

companions.^ Seneca tells us that in his day all 
Eome seemed to go mad on this holiday. 

But we must now turn to the real ludi, organised 
by the State on a large and ever increasing scale. 
The oldest and most imposing of these were the 
Ludi Eomani or Magni, lasting from September 5 
to September 19 in Cicero's time. These had their 
origin in the return of a victorious army at the end 
of the season of war, when king or consul had to 
carry out the vows he had made when entering on his 
campaign. The usual form of the vow was to enter- 
tain the people on his return, in honour of Jupiter, 
and thus they were originally called ludi votivi, 
before they were incorporated as a regularly recur- 
ring festival. After they became regular and annual, 
any entertainment vowed by a general had to take 
place on other days ; thus in the year 70 B.C. 
Pompey's triumphal ludi votivi immediately pre- 
ceded the Ludi Eomani of that year,^ giving the 
people in all some thirty days of holiday. The 
centre-point, and original day, of the Ludi Eomani 
was the Ides (13th) of September, which was also 
the day of the epulum Jovis,^ and the dies natalis 
(dedication day) of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter ; 
and the whole ceremonial was closely connected with 

^ See above, p, 172. Marquardt, Privatleien, p. 586 ; Frazer, Golden 
Bough (ed. 2), vol. iii. p. 138 foil. 

"^ Cic. Vcrr. I. 10. 31 ; where Cicero complains of the diflSicidties he 
experienced in conducting his case in consequence of the number of ludi 
from August to November in that year. 

' Fowler, Boman Festivals, p. 217 folL 



292 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

that temple and its great deity. The triumphal 
procession passed along the Sacra via to the Capitol, 
and thence again to the Circus Maximus, where the 
ludi were held. The show must have been most 
imposing ; first marched the boys and youths, on foot 
and on horseback, then the chariots and charioteers 
about to take part in the racing, with crowds of 
dancers and flute-players,^ and lastly the images of 
the Capitoline deities themselves, carried on fercula 
(biers). All such shows and processions were dear to 
the Eoman people, and this seems to have become a 
permanent feature of the Ludi Romani, whether or 
no an actual triumph was to be celebrated, and also 
of some other ludi, e.g. the ApoUinares and the 
Megalenses.^ Thus the idea was kept up that the 
greatness and prosperity of Rome were especially due 
to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, who, since the days of 
the Tarquinii, had looked down on his people from 
his temple on the Capitol.^ 

The Ludi Plebeii in November seem to have been 
a kind of plebeian duplicate of the Ludi Romani. 
As fully developed at the end of the Republic, they 
lasted from the 4th to the 17th; their centre- 
point and original day was the Ides (13th), on which, 
as on September 13, there was an epulum Jo vis in 

^ See the account in Dion. Hal. vii. 72, taken from Fabius Pictor. 

2 See Friedlander in Marquardt, Staatsverwaltung, iii. p. 508, note 3. 

^ For full accounts of this procession, and the whole question of the Ludi 
Romani, see Friedlander, I.e. ; Wissowa, Religion und Kultus, p. 383 foil. ; or 
the article " Triumphus " in the Diet, of Antiquities, ed. 2. All accounts owe 
much to Mommsen's essay in Romisehe ForscTiungen, ii. p. 42 foil. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 293 

the Capitol/ They are connected with the name of 
that Flaminius who built the circus Flaminius in the 
Campus Martius in 220 B.C., the champion of popular 
rights, killed soon afterwards at Trasimene ; and it 
is probable that his object in erecting this new place 
of entertainment was to provide a convenient build- 
ing free of aristocratic associations. But unfortunately 
we know very little of the history of these ludi. 

If we may suppose that the Ludi Plebeii were 
instituted just before the second Punic war, it is 
interesting to note that three other great ludi were 
organised in the course of that war, no doubt with 
the object of keeping up the drooping spirits of the 
urban population. The Ludi Apollinares were vowed 
by a praetor urbanus in 212, when the fate of Eome 
was hanging in the balance, and celebrated in the 
Circus Maximus : in 208 they were fixed to a 
particular day, July 13, and eventually extended 
to eight, viz. July 6-13.^ In 204 were instituted 
the Ludi Megalenses, to celebrate the arrival in 
Rome of the Magna Mater from Pessinus in Phrygia, 
i.e. on April 4 ; but the ludi were eventually ex- 
tended to April 10.^ Lastly, in 202 the Ludi Ceriales, 
which probably existed in some form already, were 
made permanent and fixed for April 19 : they eventu- 
ally lasted from the 12th to the 19th.' After the 
war was over we only find one more set of ludi per- 

■* On the parallelism between the Ludi Plebeii and Romani see Mommsen, 
Staatsrecht, ii. p. 508, note 4. 

^ Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 179 foil. ^ jj^ p. gg. * lb. p. 72 folL 



294 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

manently established, viz. the Florales, which date 
from 173. The original day was April 28, which had 
long been one of coarse enjoyment for the plebs ; like 
the other ludi, these too were extended, and eventu- 
ally reached to May 3.^ April, we may note, was a 
month chiefly consisting of holidays : the Ludi Mega- 
lenses, Ceriales, and Florales occupied no less than 
seventeen of its twenty-nine days. 

When Sulla wished to commemorate his victory 
at the CoUine gate, he instituted Ludi Victoriae on 
November 1, the date of the battle, and these seem 
to have been kept up after most of Sulla's work had 
been destroyed; they are mentioned by Cicero in 
the passage quoted above from the Verrines, as Ludi 
Victoriae, but we hear comparatively little of them. 

Before we go on to describe the nature of these 
numerous entertainments, it may be as well to reahse 
that the spectators had nothing to pay for them; 
they were provided by the State free of cost, as being 
part of certain religious festivals which it was the duty 
of the government to keep up. Certain sums were 
set aside for this purpose, diff"ering in amount from 
time to time ; thus in 217 B.C., for the Ludi Romani, 
on which up to that time 200,000 sesterces (£16,600) 
had been spent, the sum of 333, 333^ sest was voted, 
because the number three had a sacred signification, 
and the moment was one of extreme peril for the State.^ 
On one occasion only before the end of the Republic 
do we hear of any public collection for the ludi; 

^ Fowler, Eoman Festivals, p. 91 foil. ^ Livy xxii. 10, 7 ; Dionys. vii. 71, 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 295 

in 186 B.C. Pliny tells us that every one was so well 
off, owing no doubt to the enormous amount of booty 
brought from the war in the East, that all subscribed 
some small sum for the games of Scipio Asiaticus.* 
There was no doubt a growing demand for magni- 
ficence in the shows, and thus it came about that 
the amount provided by the State had to be 
supplemented. But the usual way of supplementing 
it was for the magistrate in charge of the ludi to pay 
what he could out of his own purse, or to get his 
friends to help him ; and as all the ludi except the 
ApoUinares were in charge of the aediles, it became 
the practice for these, if they aspired to reach the 
praetorship and consulship, to vie with each other in 
the recklessness of their expenditure. As early as 
176 B.C. the senate had tried to limit this personal 
expenditure, for Ti. Sempronius Gracchus as aedile had 
that year spent enormous sums on his ludi, and had 
squeezed money (it does not appear how) out of the 
subject populations of Italy, as well as the provinces, 
to entertain the Eoman people.^ But naturally no 
decrees of the senate on such matters were likely 
to have permanent effect ; the great famihes whose 
younger members aimed at popularity in this way 
were far too powerful to be easily checked. In the 
last age of the Republic it had become a necessary 
part of the aedile's duty to supplement the State's 
contribution, and as a rule he had to borrow heavily, 

^ Pliny, N.R. xxxiii. 138. The same thing happened once or twice 
under Augustus. ^ Livy xl. 44. 



296 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

and thus to involve himself financially quite early in 
his political career. In his de Officiis,^ writing of the 
virtue of liheralitas, Cicero gives a list of men who 
had been munificent as aediles, including the elder 
and younger Crassus, Mucins Scaevola (a man, he 
says, of great self-restraint), the two LucuUi, 
Hortensius, and Silanus ; and adds that in his own 
consulship P. Lentulus outdid all his predecessors, and 
was imitated by Scaurus in 58 B.c.^ Cicero himself 
had to undertake the Ludi Eomani, Megalenses, and 
Florales in his aedileship ; how he managed it 
financially he does not tell us.^ Caesar undoubtedly 
borrowed largely, for his expenditure as aedile was 
enormous,* and he had no private fortune of any 
considerable amount. 

Our friend Caelius Rufus was elected curule aedile 
while he was in correspondence with Cicero, and his 
letters give us a good idea of the condition of the 
mind of an ambitious young man who is bent on 
making the most of himself. He is in a continual 
state of fidget about his games ; he has set his heart 
on getting panthers to exhibit and hunt, and urges 
Cicero in letter after letter to procure them for him 
in Cilicia. " It will be a disgrace to you," he writes 
in one of them, " that Patiscus has sent ten panthers 
to Curio, and that you should not send me ten times 

1 ii. 16, 57 foil. 

2 We have some details of the ridiculously lavish expenditure of this 
aedile in Pliny, N.H, xxxvi. 114. He built a temporary theatre, which was 
decorated as though it were to be a permanent monument of magnificence. 

' Verr. v. 14. 36. * Plut. Caes. 5. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 297 

as many." ^ The provincial governor, lie urges, can 
do what he pleases ; let Cicero send for some men of 
Cibyra,let him write to Pamphylia, where they are most 
abundant, and he will get what he wants, or rather 
what Caelius wants. Even after a letter full of the 
most important accounts of public business, including 
copies of senatus consulta {ad Fam. viii. 8), he harks 
back at the end to the inevitable panthers. Cicero tells 
Atticus that he rebuked Caelius for pressing him thus 
hard to do what his conscience could not approve, 
and that it was not right, in his opinion, for a 
provincial governor to set* the people of Cibyra 
hunting for panthers for Roman games. ^ From the 
same passage it would seem that Caelius had also 
been urging him to take other steps in his province of 
which he disapproved, no doubt with the same object 
of raising money for the ludi. This letter to Caelius 
is not extant, but we may believe that Cicero had 
the courage to reprove his old pupil, and that the 
constant worrying for panthers was more than even 
his amiability could stand. But others were less 
sensitive ; and it is a well known fact in natural 
history that the Eoman games had a powerful effect, 
from this time forwards, in diminishing the numbers 
of wild animals in the countries bordering on the 
Mediterranean, and in bringing about the extinction 
of species. In our own day the same work is carried 
on by the big-game sportsman, somewhat farther 
afield ; the pleasure of slaughter being now confined 

^ Cic. ad Fam. viii. 9. ^ ad Att. vi. 1. 21. 



298 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

to the few rich and adventurous, who shoot for their 
own delectation, and not to make a London holiday. 

Thus to all his ludi the citizen had the right of 
admission free of cost/ An Englishman may find 
some difficulty at first in realising this ; it is as if 
cricket and football matches and theatres in London 
were open to the pubhc gratis, and the cost provided 
by the London County Council. Yet it is not 
difficult to understand how the Roman government 
drifted into a practice which was eventually found to 
have such unfortunate results. It has already been 
explained that ludi were originally attached to certain 
religious festivals, which it was the duty of the State 
and its priests and magistrates to maintain. The 
Eomans, like all Italians, loved shows and out-of- 
door enjoyment, and as the population increased and 
became more liable to excitement during the stress of 
the great wars with Carthage, it became necessary to 
keep them cheerful and in good humour by developing 
the old ludi and instituting new ones, for which it 
would have been contrary to all precedent to make 
them pay. The government, as we may guess from 
the history of the ludi which has just been sketched, 
seems to have been careful at first not to go too far 
with this policy, and it was some time before any ludi 
but the Romani were made annual and extended to 
the length they eventually reached. But the sudden 

^ There is no evidence that slaves were admitted under the Kepublic. 
Columella, who wrote under Nero, is the first to mention their presence at 
the games {H.H. i. 8. 2), unless we consider the villous of Horace, Epist. 
i. 14. 15, as a slave. See Friedlander in Marq. p. 491, note 4. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 299 

increase of wealth after the great struggle was over 
was answerable for this, as for so many other 
damaging tendencies. We have seen that the people 
themselves in 186 were able and willing to contribute ; 
and now it was possible for aediles to invest their 
capital in popular undertakings which might, later 
on, pay them well by carrying them on to higher 
magistracies and provincial governorships, where fresh 
fortunes might be made. The evil results are, of 
course, as obvious here as in the parallel case of the 
corn-supply (see above, p. 34) ; enormous amounts of 
capital were used unproductively, and the people were 
gradually accustomed to beheve that the State was 
responsible for their enjoyment as well as their food. 
But we must be most careful not to jump to the con- 
clusion that this was due to any dehberate policy on 
the part of the Eoman government. They drifted into 
these dangerous shoals in spite of the occasional efforts 
of intelhgent steersmen ; and it would indeed have 
needed a higher political intelligence than was then 
and there available, to have fully divined the 
direction of the drift and the dangers ahead of them. 

We must now turn in the last place to consider 
the nature of the entertainments, and see whether 
there was any improving or educational influence 
in them. 

These had originally consisted entirely of shows 
of a military character, as we have seen in the case 
of the Ludi Romani, and especially of chariot-racing 
in the old Circus Maximus. The Romans seem 



300 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

always to have been fond of horses and racing, though 
they never developed a large or thoroughly efficient 
cavalry force. It is probable that the position of 
the Circus Maximus in the vallis Murcia ^ was due to 
horse-racing near the underground altar of Consus, 
a harvest deity, and the oldest religious calendar 
has Equirria (horse-races) on February 27 and March 
14, no doubt in connexion with the preparation of 
the cavalry for the coming season of war. And in 
the very curious ancient rite known as " the October 
horse," there was a two-horse chariot-race in the 
Campus Martins, when the season of arms was over, 
and the near horse of the winning pair was sacrificed 
to Mars.^ The Ludi Eomani consisted chiefly of 
chariot-races until 364 B.C. (when plays were first 
introduced), together with other military evolutions 
or exercises, such perhaps as the Indus Troiae of the 
Eoman boys, described by Virgil in the fifth Aeneid. 
Of the Ludi Plebeii we do not know the original char- 
acter, but it is likely that these also began with 
circenses, the regular word for chariot-races. The Ludi 
Cereales certainly included circenses, and plays are 
only mentioned as forming part of their programme 
under the Empire; but on the last day, April 19, 
there was a curious practice of letting foxes loose 
in the Circus Maximus with burninof firebrands tied 
to their tails,^ — a custom undoubtedly ancient, which 
may have suggested the venationes (hunts) of later 

^ See above, p. 13 ; Fowler, Eoman Festivals, p. 208. 
■■* Eoman Festivals, p. 241. ^ 2j_ p_ 77 foU. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 301 

times, for one of which Caelius wanted his panthers. 
Of the other three ludi, ApoUinares, Megalenses, and 
Florales, we only know that they included both 
circenses and plays ; we must take it as probable 
that the former were in their programme from the first. 
There is no need to describe here in detail the 
manner of the chariot -racing. We can picture to 
ourselves the Circus Maximus filled with a dense 
crowd of some 150,000 people,^ the senators in 
reserved places, and the consul or other magistrate 
presiding; the chariots, usually four in number, 
painted at this time either red or white, with their 
drivers in the same colours, issuing from the carceres 
at the end of the circus next to the Forum Boarium 
and the river, and at the signal racing round a course 
of about 1600 yards, divided into two halves by a 
spina ; at the farther end of this the chariots had 
to turn sharply and always with a certain amount of 
danger, which gave the race its chief interest. Seven 
complete laps of this course constituted a missus or 
race,^ and the number of races in a day varied from 
time to time, according to the season of the year and 
the equipment of the particular ludi. The rivalry 
between factions and colours, which became so famous 
later on and lasted throughout the period of the 
Empire, was only just beginning in Cicero's time. 
We hear hardly anything of such excitement in the 
literature of the period ; we only know that there 

^ Dionys. Hal. iii. 68 gives this number for Augustus' time, and so far as 
we know Augustus had not enlarged the Circus. ^ Gell. iii. 10. 16. 



302 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

were already two rival colours, white and red, and 
Pliny tells us the strange story that one chariot- 
owner, a Caecina of Volaterrae, used to bring swallows 
into the city smeared with his colour, which he let 
loose to fly home and so bear the news of a victory.^ 
Human nature in big cities seems to demand some 
such artificial stimulus to excitement, and without it 
the racing must have been monotonous ; but of betting 
and gambling we as yet hear nothing at all. Gradually, 
as vast sums of money were laid out by capitalists 
and even by senators upon the horses and drivers, 
the colour-factions increased in numbers, and their 
rivalry came to occupy men's minds as completely as 
do now the chances of football teams in our own 
manufacturing towns. ^ 

Exhibitions of gladiators (munera) did not as yet 
take place at ludi or on public festivals, but they 
may be mentioned here, because they were already 
becoming the favourite amusement of the common 
people ; Cicero in the pro Sestio ^ speaks of them as 
" that kind of spectacle to which all sorts of people 
crowd in the greatest numbers, and in which the 
multitude takes the greatest delight." The con- 
sequence was, of course, that candidates for election 
to magistracies took every opportunity of giving 

^ Pliny, N'.H. x. 71 : lie seems to be referring to an earlier time, and this 
Caecina may have been the friend of Cicero. In another passage of Pliny 
we hear of the red faction about the time of Sulla (vii. 186 ; Friedl. p. 517). 
Cp. TertuUian, de Spectaculis, 9. 

2 For a graphic picture of the scene in the Circus in Augustus* time see 
Ovid, Ars Amatoria, i. 135 foil. ^ ch. 59. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 303 

them ; and Cicero himself in his consulship inserted 
a clause in his lex c?e ambitu forbidding candidates 
to give such exhibitions within two years of the 
election/ They were given exclusively by private 
individuals up to 105 B.C., either in the Forum or in 
one or other circus : in that year there was an exhibi- 
tion by the consuls, but there is some evidence that 
it was intended to instruct the soldiers in the better 
use of their weapons. This was a year in which the 
State was in sore need of efficient soldiers ; Marius 
was at the same time introducing a new system of 
recruiting and of arming the soldier, and we are told 
that the consul Rutilius made use of the best gladi- 
ators that were to be found in the training-school 
(Indus) of a certain Scaurus, to teach the men a 
more skilful use of their weapons.^ If gladiators 
could have been used only for a rational purpose like 
this, as skilful swordsmen and military instructors, 
the State might well have maintained some force 
of them. But as it was they remained in private 
hands, and no limit could be put on the numbers so 
maintained. They became a permanent menace to 
the peace of society, as has already been mentioned 
in the chapter on slavery. Their frequent use in 
funeral games is a somewhat loathsome feature of 
the age. These funeral games were an old religious 
institution, occurring on the ninth day after the burial, 

^ See Schol, Bob. on the ^ro Sestio, new Teubner ed., p, 105. 
2 Val. Max. ii. 3. 2. The conjecture as to the object of the exhibition by 
the consuls is that of Biicheler, in Rhein. Mus. 1883, p. 476 foil. 



304 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

and known as Ludi Novemdiales ; they are familiar 
to every one from Virgil's skilful introduction of them, 
as a Eoman equivalent for the Homeric games, in the 
fifth Aeneid, on the anniversary of the funeral of 
Anchises. Virgil has naturally omitted the gladiators; 
but long before his time it had become common to 
use the opportunity of the funeral of a relation to 
give mnnera for the purpose of gaining popularity.^ 
A good example is that of young Curio, who in 
53 B.C. ruined himself in this way. Cicero alludes to 
this in an interesting letter to Curio.^ "You may 
reach the highest honours," he says, "more easily 
by your natural advantages of character, diligence, 
and fortune, than by gladiatorial exhibitions. The 
power of giving them stirs no feeling of admiration 
in any one : it is a question of means and not of 
character : and there is no one who is not by this 
time sick and tired of them." To Cicero's refined 
mind they were naturally repugnant; but young 
men like Curio, though they loved Cicero, were not 
wont to follow his wholesome advice.^ 

We turn now to the dramatic element in the ludi, 
chiefly with the object of determining whether, in 
the age of Cicero, it was of any real importance in 
the social life of the Eoman people. The Eoman 

1 The example was set, according to Livy, Epit. 16, by a Junius Brutus 
at the beginning of the first Punic war. ^ ad Fam. ii. 3. 

8 The origin of these bloody shows at funerals needs further investigation. 
It may be connected with a primitive and savage custom of sacrificing 
captives to the Manes of a chief, of which we have a reminiscence in the 
sacrifice of captives by Aeneas, in Virg. Aen. xi. 82. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 305 

stage had had a great history before the last century 
B.C., into which it is not necessary here to enter. It 
had always been possible without dijB&culty for those 
who were responsible for the ludi to put on the 
stage a tragedy or comedy either written for the 
occasion or reproduced, with competent actors and 
the necessary music ; and there seems to be no 
doubt that both tragedies and comedies, whether 
adapted from the Greek (fabulae palliatae) or of a 
national character (fab. togatae), were enjoyed by 
the audiences. In the days of the Punic wars and 
afterwards, when everything Greek was popular, a 
Roman audience could appreciate stories of the 
Greek mythology, as presented in the tragedies of 
Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, if without learning to 
read in them the great problems of human life, at 
least as spectacles of the vicissitudes of human 
fortune ; and had occasionally listened to a tragedy, 
or perhaps rather a dramatic history, based on some 
familiar legend of their own State. And the condi- 
tions of social life in Rome and Athens were not so 
different but that in the hands of a real genius like 
Plautus the New Athenian comedy could come 
home to the Roman people, with their dehght in 
rather rough fun and comical situations : and 
Plautus was followed by Caecilius and the more 
refined Terence, before the national comedy of 
Afranius and others established itself in the place 
of the Greek. It is hardly possible to avoid the 

conclusion that in those early days of the Roman 

X 



306 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

theatre the audiences were really intelligent, and 
capable of learning something from the pieces they 
listened to, apart from their natural love of a show, 
of all acting, and of music. ^ 

But before the age with which this book deals, 
the long succession of great dramatic writers had 
come to an end. Accius, the nephew of Pacuvius, 
had died as a very old man when Cicero was a boy ; ^ 
and in the national comedy no one had been found 
to follow Afranius, The times were disturbed, the 
population was restless, and continually incorporating 
heterogeneous elements : much amusement could be 
found in the hfe of the Forum, and in rioting and 
disorder ; gladiatorial shows were organised on a 
large scale. To sit still and watch a good play 
would become more tiresome as the plebs grew more 
restless, and probably even the taste of the better 
educated was degenerating as the natural result of 
luxury and idleness. Politics and political personages 
were the really exciting features of the time, and 
there are signs that audiences took advantage of 
the plays to express their approval or dislike of a 
statesman. In a letter to Atticus, written in the 
summer of 59,^ the first year of the triumvirate, 
Cicero describes with enthusiasm how at the Ludi 
ApoUinares the actor Diphilus made an allusion to 
Pompey in the words (from an unknown tragedy 

^ See Lucian Miiller's JEnnius, p. 35 foil., where he maintains against 
Mommsen the intelligence and taste of the Romans of the 2n(i century B.O. 

2 Cic. Brutus, 28. 107, where he speaks of having known the poet himself. 

3 ad Att. ii. 19. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 307 

then being acted), " Nostra miseria tu es — Magnus," 
and was forced to repeat them many times. When 
he delivered the Hne 

" Eandem virtutem istam veniet tempus cum graviter gemes," 

the whole theatre broke out into frantic applause. 
So too in a well-known passage of the speech pro 
Sestio he tells from hearsay how the great tragic 
actor Aesopus, acting in the Eurysaces of Accius, 
was again and again interrupted by applause as he 
cleverly adapted the words to the expected recall 
from exile of the orator, his personal friend.^ The 
famous words " Summum amicum, summo in bello, 
summo ingenio praeditum," were among those which 
the modest Cicero tells us were taken up by the 
people with enthusiasm, — greatly, without doubt, to 
the detriment of the play. The whole passage is 
one of great graphic power, and only fails to rouse 
us too to enthusiasm when we reflect that Cicero 
was not himself present. 

From this and other passages we have abundant 
evidence that tragedies were still acted ; but Cicero 
nowhere in his correspondence, where we might 
naturally have expected to find it, nor in his philo- 
sophical works, gives us any idea of their educational 
or aesthetic influence either on himself or others. 
He is constantly quoting the old plays, especially 
the tragedies, and knows them very well : but he 
quotes them almost invariably as literature only. 

1 Pro Sestio, 55. 117 foil. 



308 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Once or twice, as we shall see, he recalls the gesture 
or utterance of a great actor, but as a rule he is 
thinking of them as poetry rather than as plays. It 
may be noted in this connexion that it was now 
becoming the fashion to write plays without any 
immediate intention of bringing them on the stage. 
We read with astonishment in a letter of Cicero to 
his brother Quintus, then in Gaul, that the latter 
had taken to play -writing, and accomplished four 
tragedies in sixteen days, and this apparently in 
the course of the campaign.^ One, the Erigona, was 
sent to his brother from Britain, and lost on the 
way. We hear no more of these plays, and have no 
reason to suppose that they were worthy to survive. 
No man of literary eminence in that day wrote 
plays for acting, and in fact the only person of note, 
so far as we know, who did so, was the younger 
Cornelius Balbus, son of the intimate friend and 
secretary of Caesar. This man wrote one in Latin 
about his journey to his native town of Oades, had 
it put on the stage there, and shed tears during its 
performance.^ 

When we hear of plays being written without 
being acted, and of tragedies being made the occasion 
of expressing political opinions, we may be pretty 
sure that the drama is in its nonage. An interest- 
ing proof of the same tendency is to be found in the 

^ ad Q. Fratr. iii. 5. 

2 It 13 only fair to say that this information comes from a letter of Asinius 
Pollio to Cicero {ad Fam. x, 32. 3), and as PoUio was one who had a word of 
mockery for every one, we may discount the story of the tears. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 309 

first book of the Ars Amatoria of Ovid, though 
it belongs to the age of Augustus. In this book 
Ovid describes the various resorts in the city where 
the youth may look out for his girl ; and when he 
comes to the theatre, draws a pretty picture of the 
ladies of taste and fashion crowding thither, — but 

Spectatum veniunt : veniunt spectentur ut ipsae. 

And then, without a word about the play, or the 
smallest hint that he or the ladies really cared about 
such things, he goes off into the familiar story of the 
rape of the Sabine women, supposed to have taken 
place when Romulus was holding his ludi. 

It is curious, in View of what thus seems to be a 
flagging interest in the drama as such, to find that 
the most remarkable event in the theatrical history 
of this time is the building of the first permanent 
stone theatre. During the whole long period of the 
popularity of the drama the government had never 
consented to the erection of a permanent theatre 
after the Greek fashion ; though it was impossible 
to prohibit the production of plays adapted from 
the Greek, there seems to have been some strange 
scruple felt about giving Rome this outward token 
of a Greek city. Temporary stages were erected in 
the Forum or the circus, the audience at first standing, 
but afterwards accommodated with seats in a cavea 
of wood erected for the occasion. The whole show, 
including play, actors, and pipe -players^ to accom- 

^ Tibicines, usually mistranslated flute-players ; this characteristic Italian 



3IO SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

pany the voices where necessary, was contracted for, 
like all such undertakings,^ on each occasion of Ludi 
scaenici being produced. At last, in the year 154 
B.C., the censors had actually set about the building 
of a theatre, apparently of stone, when the reactionary 
Scipio Nasica, acting under the influence of a tem- 
porary anti- Greek movement, persuaded the senate 
to put a stop to this symptom of degeneracy, and 
to pass a decree that no seats were in future to be 
provided, "ut scilicet remissioni animorum standi 
virilitas propria Romanae gentis iuncta esset." ^ 
Whether this extraordinary decree, of which the 
legality might have been questioned a generation 
later, had any permanent efi'ect, we do not know; 
certainly the senators, and after the time of Gains 
Gracchus the equites, sat on seats appropriated to 
them. But Rome continued to be without a stone 
theatre until Pompey, in the year of his second 
consulship, 55 B.C., built one on a grand scale, 
capable of holding 40,000 people. Even he, we 
are told, could not accomphsh this without some 
criticism from the old and old-fashioned, — so lasting 
was the prejudice against anything that might seem 
to be turning Rome into a Greek city.^ There was 
a story too, of which it is difficult to make out the 
real origin, that he was compelled by popular feel- 

mstrument was really a primitive oboe played with a reed, and usually of 
tlie double form (two pipes with a connected mouthpiece), still sometimes 
seen in Italy. 

1 See above, p. 70, ^ Val. Max. ii. 4. 2 ; Livy, IJpiL 48. 

' Tacitus, Arm. xiv. 20. 



rrii 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 311 

ing to conceal his design by building, immediately 
behind the theatre, a temple of Venus Victrix, the 
steps of which were in some way connected with his 
auditorium.^ The theatre was placed in the Campus 
Martins, and its shape is fairly well known to us from 
fragments of the Capitoline plan of the city ; ^ adjoin- 
ing it Pompey also built a magnificent porticus for 
the convenience of the audience, and a curia, in which 
the senate could meet, and where, eleven years later, 
the great Dictator was murdered at the feet of 
Pompey's statue. 

In spite of the magnificence of this building, it 
was by no means destined to revive the earlier 
prosperity of the tragic and comic drama. Even 
at the opening of it the signs of degeneracy are 
apparent. Luckily for us Cicero was in Rome at 
the time, and in a letter to a friend in the country 
he congratulates him on being too unwell to come to 
Rome and see the spoiling of old tragedies by over- 
display.^ "The ludi," he says, "had not even that 
charm which games on a moderate scale generally 
have ; the spectacle was so elaborate as to leave no 
Toom for cheerful enjoyment, and I think you need 
feel no regret at having missed it. What is the 
pleasure of a train of six hundred mules in the 

^ TertuUian, de Spectaculis, 10 ; Pliny, N.H. viii. 20. 

^ See the excellent account in Hiilsen, vol. iii. of Jordan's Topographic, 
p. 524 foil. Some of the arches of the supporting arcade are still visible. 

^ ad Fam. vii. 1. Professor Tyrrell calls this letter a rhetorical exercise ; 
is it not rather one of those in which Cicero is taking pains to write, there- 
fore writing less easily and naturally than usual ? 



312 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

Clytemnestra (of Accius), or three thousand bowls 
(craterae) in the Trojan Horse (of Livius), or gay- 
coloured armour of infantry and cavalry in some mimic 
battle ? These things roused the admiration of the 
vulgar : to you they would have brought no delight." 
This ostentatious stage-display finds its counterpart 
to some extent at the present day, and may remind us 
also of the huge orchestras of blaring sound which are 
the delight of the modern composer and the modern 
musical audience. And the plays were by no means 
the only part of the show. There were displays of 
athletes ; but these never seem to have greatly 
interested a Roman audience, and Cicero says that 
Pompey confessed that they were a failure ; but to 
make up for that there were wild-beast shows for five 
whole days [venationes) — "magnificent," the letter 
goes on, *' no one denies it, yet what pleasure can it 
be to a man of refinement, when a weak man is torn 
by a very powerful animal, or a splendid animal is 
transfixed by a hunting-spear ? . . . The last day 
was that of the elephants, about which there was a 
good deal of astonishment on the part of the vulgar 
crowd, but no pleasure whatever. Nay, there was 
even a feeling of compassion aroused by them, and a 
notion that this animal has something in common 
with mankind." ^ This last interesting sentence is 
confirmed by a passage in Pliny's Natural History^ 
in which he asserts that the people were so much 

^ I have used Mr. Shuckburgh's translation, with one or two verbal 
changes. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 313 

moved that they actually execrated Pompey/ The 
last age of the Republic is a transitional one, in this, 
as in other ways ; the people are not yet thoroughly 
inured to bloodshed and cruelty to animals, as they 
afterwards became when deprived of political excite- 
ments, and left with nothing violent to amuse them 
but the displays of the amphitheatre. 

Earlier in this same letter Cicero had told his 
friend Marius that on this occasion certain old actors 
had re-appeared on the stage, who, as he thought, had 
left it for good. The only one he mentions is the 
great tragic actor Aesopus, who " was in such a state 
that no one could say a word against his retiring 
from the profession." At one important point his 
voice failed him. This may conveniently remind us 
that Aesopus was the last of the great actors of 
tragedy, and that his best days were in the early 
half of this century — another sign of the decay of 
the legitimate drama. He was an intimate friend of 
Cicero, and from a few references to him in the 
Ciceronian writings we can form some idea of his 
genius. In one passage Cicero writes of having seen 
him looking so wild and gesticulating so excitedly, 
that he seemed almost to have lost command of him- 
self^ In the description, already quoted from the 
speech pro Sestio, of the scene in the theatre before 
his recall from exile, he speaks of this "summus 
artifex " as delivering his allusions to the exile with 

^ Pliny, Nat. Hist. viii. 21. 
= de Div. i. 37. 80. Cp. the story in Plut. Cic. 5. 



314 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

infinite force and passion. Yet the later tradition of 
his acting was rather that he was serious and self- 
restrained ; Horace calls him gravis, and Quintilian 
too speaks of his gravitas? Probably, like Garrick, 
he was capable of a great variety of moods and 
parts. How carefully he studied the varieties of 
gesticulation is indicated by a curious story pre- 
served by Valerius Maximus, that he and Roscius the 
great comedian used to go and sit in the courts in 
order to observe the action of the orator Hortensius.^ 
Roscius too was an early intimate friend of Cicero, 
who, like Caesar, seems to have valued the friendship 
of all men of genius, without regard to their origin 
or profession. Roscius seems to have been a freed- 
man ; ^ his great days were in Cicero's early life, and 
he died in 61 B.C., to the deep grief of all his friends.* 
So wonderfully finished was his acting that it became 
a common practice to call any one a Roscius whose 
work was more than usually perfect. He never could 
find a pupil of whom he could entirely approve; 
many had good points, but if there were a single blot, 
the master could not bear it.^ In the de Orator e 
Cicero tells us several interesting things about him, — 
how he laid the proper emphasis on the right words, 
reserving his gesticulation until he cajne to them ; 
and how he was never so much admired when acting 

^ Hor. Ep. ii, 82 ; Quintil. ii. 3. 111. 

^ Val. Max. viii. 10. 2. Cicero was said to have learnt gesticulation both 
from Aesopus and Roscius. — Plut. Cic. 5. 

s Pliny, N.m vii. 128. * Pro Archia, 8. 

^ De Oratore, i. 28. 129. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 315 

with a mask on, because the expression of his face 
was so full of meaning.^ 

In Cicero's later years, when Eoscius was dead and 
Aesopus retired, we hear no more of great actors of 
this type. With these two remarkable men the great 
days of the Eoman drama come to an end, and 
henceforward the favourite plays are merely farces, 
of which a word must here be said in the last place. 

The origin of these farces, as indeed of all kinds of 
Latin comedy, and probably also of the literary satura, 
is to be found in the jokes and rude fun of the country 
festivals, and especially perhaps, as Horace tells us 
of the harvest amusements : ^ 

Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem 
Versibus altemis opprobria rustica fudit, 
Libertasque recurrentis accepta per annos 
Lusit amabiliter, etc. 

Epist. ii. 1. 145 foil. 

These amusements were always accompanied with 
the music and dancing so dear to the Italian peoples, 
and it is easy to divine how they may have gradually 
developed into plays of a rude but tolerably fixed 
type, with improvised dialogue, acted in the streets, 
or later in the intervals between acts at the theatre, 
and eventually as afterpieces, more after our own 
fashion. 

In Cicero's day two kinds of farces were in vogue. 
In his earlier life the so-called Atellan plays (fabulae 

1 De Oratore, iii. 27, 59. 

2 A useful succinct account of the literature of this difficult subject will 
be found in Schanz, Oesch. der rim. Litteratur, vol. i. (ed. 3) p. 21 foil. 



3i6 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Atellanae) were tlie favourites : these were of indi- 
genous Latin origin, and probably took their name 
from the ruined town Atella, which might provide a 
permanent scenery as the background of the plays 
without offending the jealousy of any of the other 
Latin cities.^ They were doubtless very comic, but 
it was possible to get tired of them, for the number 
of stock characters was limited, and the masks were 
always the same for each character — the old man 
Pappus, the glutton Bucco, Dossennus the sharper, etc. 
About the time of Sulla the mimes seem to have dis- 
placed these old farces in popular favour, perhaps 
because their fun was more varied ; the mere fact that 
the actors did not wear masks shows that the impro- 
visation could be freer and less stereotyped. But both 
kinds were alike coarse, and may be called the comedy 
of low life in country towns and in the great city. 
Sulla's tastes seem to have been low in the matter 
of plays, if we may trust Plutarch, who asserts that 
when he was young he spent much of his time among 
mimi and jesters, and that when he was dictator 
he " daily got together from the theatre the lewdest 
persons, with whom he would drink and enter into 
a contest of coarse witticisms." ^ This may be due 
to the evidence of an enemy, but it is not improbable; 
and it is possible that both Sulla and Caesar, who 
also patronised the mimes, may have wished to avoid 

^ This is the view of Mommsen, Hist. iii. p. 455, which is generally 
accepted. For further information see TeufFel, Hist, of Roman Literature, 
i. (ed. 2) p. 9. That they were in fashion before the mimus is gathered 
from Cic. ad Fam. ix. 16. " Plut. Sulla, 2 : cp. 36. 



X HOLIDAYS AND AMUSEMENTS 317 

the personal allusions which, as we have seen, were so 
often made or imagined in the exhibition of tragedies, 
and have aimed at confining the plays to such as 
would give less opportunity for unwelcome criticism.^ 
About the year 50 B.C., as we have seen in the 
chapter on education, there came to Italy the Syrian 
Publilius, who began to write mimes in verse, thus 
for the first time giving them a literary turn. Caesar, 
always on the look-out for talent, summoned him to 
Eome, and awarded him the palm for his plays. ^ 
These must have been, as regards wit and style, of 
a much higher order than any previous mimes, and 
in fact not far removed from the older Roman comedy 
(fabula togata) in manner. Cicero alludes to them 
twice : and writing to Cornificius from Eome in 
October 45 he says that at Caesar's ludi he listened 
to the poems of Publilius and Laberius with a well- 
pleased mind.^ " Nihil mihi tamen deesse scito quam 
quicum haec familiariter docteque rideam " ; here the 
word docte seems to suggest that the performance 
was at least worthy of the attention of a cultivated 
man. Laberius, also a Roman knight, wrote mimes 
at the same time as Publilius, and was beaten by him 
in competition ; of him it is told that he was induced 

^ Political allusions in mimes, were, however, not unknown. Cp. Cic. 
■arf Att. xiv. 3, written in 44 B.C., after Caesar's death. 

2 All the passages about Publilius are collected in Mr. Bickford Smith's 
edition of his Sententiae, p. 10 foil. On mimes generally the reader may be 
referred to Professor Purser's excellent article in Smith's Diet, of Antiq. 
ed. 2. 

^ Animo aequissimo, ad Fam. xii. 19. He means perhaps rather that 
flattering allusions to Caesar did not hurt his feelings. 



3i8 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap, x 

by Caesar to act in his own mime, and revenged 
himself for the insult, as it was then felt to be by a 
Roman of good birth, in a prologue which has come 
down to us.^ We may suppose that his plays were 
of the same type as those of Publilius, and inter- 
spersed with those wise sayings, sententiae, which 
the Roman people were still capable of appreciating. 
Even in the time of Seneca applause was given to 
any words which the audience felt at once to be true 
and to hit the mark.^ 

Thus the mime was lifted from the level of the 
lowest farcical improvisation to a recognised position 
in literature, and quite incidentally became useful in 
education. But the coarseness remained ; the dancing 
was grotesque and the fun ribald, and, as Professor 
Purser says, the plots nearly always involved " some 
incident of an amorous nature in which ordinary 
morality was set at defiance." The Roman audience 
of the early Empire enjoyed these things, and all 
sorts of dancing, singing, and instrumental music, 
and above all the pantomimus,^ in which the actor 
only gesticulated, without speaking ; this and the 
fact that the real drama never again had a fair 
chance is one of the many signs that the city popula- 
tion was losing both virility and intelhgence. 

^ See Ribbeck, Fragm. Comic. Lat. p. 295 foil. 
2 Seneca, Epist. 108. 8. 
' See another excellent article of Professor Parser's in the Diet, of AnMq, 



CHAPTEK XI 

RELIGION 

It is easy to write the word " religion " at the head 
of this chapter, but by no means easy to find any- 
thing in this materialistic period which answers to our 
use of the word. In the whole mass, for example, of 
the Ciceronian correspondence, there is hardly any- 
thing to show that Cicero and his friends, and therefore, 
as we may presume, the average educated man of the 
day, were affected in their thinking or their conduct 
by any sense of dependence on, or responsibility to, 
a Supreme Being. If, however, it had been possible 
to substitute for the English word the Latin religiOy 
it would have made a far more appropriate title 
to this chapter, for religio meant primarily awe, 
nervousness, scruple — much the same in fact as that 
feeling which in these days we call superstition ; and 
secondarily the means taken, under the authority of 
the State, to quiet such feelings by the performance 
of rites meant to propitiate the gods.^ In both of 
these senses religio is to be found in the last age of 

^ See the Hiblert Journal for July 1907, p. 847. In the second sense 
Cicero often uses the plural " religiones, " esp. in de Legibus, ii. 

319 



320 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

tlie Republic ; but, as we shall see, the tendency to 
superstitious nervousness was very imperfectly allayed, 
and the worship that should have allayed it was in 
great measure neglected. 

It may be, indeed, that in quiet country districts 
the joyous rural festivals went on — we have many 
allusions and a few descriptions of thenl in the 
literature of the Augustan period, — and also the 
worship of the household deities, in which there 
perhaps survived a feeling of pietas more nearly 
akin to what we call religious feeling than in any 
of the cults [sacra puhlica) undertaken by the State 
for the people. Even in the city the cult of the 
dead, or what may perhaps be better called the 
religious attention paid to their resting-places, and 
the religious ceremonies attending birth, puberty, 
and marriage, were kept up as matters of form and 
custom among the upper and wealthier classes. ,But 
the great mass of the population of Rome, we may 
be almost sure, knew nothing of these rites ; the poor 
:man, for example, could no more afford a tomb for 
himself than a house, and his body was thrown into 
some puticulus or common burying-place,^ where it 
was impossible that any yearly ceremonies could be 
performed to his memory, even if any one cared to 
do so. And among the higher strata of society, out- 
side of these sacra privata, carelessness and negligence 
of the old State cults were steadily on the increase. 

^ See Middleton, Eome in 1887, p. 423 ; Horace, Sat. i. 8. 8 foil. ; Nissan, 
Italische Lavdeskuvde, ii. p. 522. 



RELIGION 321 

Neither Cicero nor any of his contemporaries but 
Varro has anything to tell us of their details, and the 
decay had gone so far that Varro himself knew little 
or nothing about many of the deities of the old 
religious calendar/ or of the ways in which they had 
at one time been worshipped. Vesta, with her simple 
cult and her virgin priestesses, was almost the only 
deity who was not either forgotten or metamorphosed 
in one way or another under the influence of Greek 
literature and mythology ; Vesta was too well recog- 
nised as a symbol of the State's vitality to be subject 
to neglect like other and less significant cults. The old 
sacrificing priesthoods, such as the Fratres Arvales 
and the lesser Flamines, seem not to have been filled 
up by the pontifices whose duty it was to do so : 
and the Flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter himself, 
is not heard of from 89 to 11 B.C., when he appears 
again as a part of the Augustan religious restoration. 
The explanation is probably that these offices could 
not DC held together with any secular one which 
might take the holder away from Eome ; and as every 
man of good family had business in the provinces, no 
qualified person could be found willing to put himself 
under the restriction. The temples too seem to have 
been sadly neglected; Augustus tells us himself^ 
that he had to restore no less than eighty-two ; and 
from Cicero we actually hear of thefts of statues and 
other temple property^ — sacrileges which may be 

^ Fowler, Roman Festivals, p. 336 foil. 
' MonuTnentum Ancyranum (Lat. ), 4. 17. * de Nat. Deor. i. 29. 82. 

Y 



322 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

attributed to the general demoralisation caused by 
the Social and Civil "Wars. At the same time there 
seems to have been a strong tendency to go after 
strange gods, with whose worship Eoman soldiers 
had made acquaintance in the course of their numer- 
ous eastern campaigns. It is a remarkable fact that 
no less than four times in a single decade the wor- 
ship of Isis had to be suppressed, — in 58, 53, 50, and 
48 B.C. In the year 50 we are told that the consul 
Aemilius PauUus, a conservative of the old type, 
actually threw off his toga praetexta and took an 
axe to begin destroying the temple, because no 
workmen could be found to venture on the work.^ 
These are indeed strange times ; the beautiful religion 
of Isis, which assuredly had some power to purify a 
man and strengthen his conscience,^ was to be driven 
out of a city where the old local religion had never 
had any such power, and where the masses were now 
left without a particle of aid or comfort from any 
religious source. The story seems to ring true, and 
gives us a most valuable glimpse into the mental 
condition of the Roman workman of the time. 

Of such foreign worships, and of the general 
neglect of the old cults, Cicero tells us nothing ; we 
have to learn or to guess at these facts from evidence 
supplied by later writers. His interest in religious 
practice was confined to ceremonies which had some 
political importance. He was himself an augur, and 

^ Valerius Maximus, Epit. 3. 4 ; Wissowa, Eel. und Kult, p. 293. 
" See, e.g. Dill, Roman Society from, Nero to Marcus Aurelius, ch. v. 



XI 



RELIGION 323 



was much pleased with his election to that ancient 
college ; but, like most other augurs of the time, he 
knew nothing of augural " science," and only cared 
to speculate philosophically on the question whether 
it is possible to foretell the future. He looked 
upon the right of the magistrate to " observe the 
heaven " as a part of an excellent constitution,^ and 
could not forgive Caesar for refusing in 59 B.C. to have 
his legislation paralysed by the fanatical declarations 
of his colleague that he was going to "look for 
lightning." He firmly believed in the value of the 
ius divinum of the State. In his treatise on the 
constitution (de Legihus) he devotes a whole book to 
this religious side of constitutional law, and gives a 
sketch of it in quasi -legal language from which it 
appears that he entirely accepted the duty of the 
State to keep the citizen in right relation to the gods, 
on whose goodwill his welfare depended. He seems 
never to have noticed that the State was neglecting 
this duty, and that, as we saw just now, temples and 
cults were falling into decay, strange forms of religion 
pressing in. Such things did not interest him ; in 
public life the State religion was to him a piece of 
the constitution, to be maintained where it was 
clearly essential ; in his own study it was a matter of 
philosophical discussion. In his young days he was 
intimate with the famous Pontifex Maximus, Mucins 
Scaevola, who held that there were three religions, — 
that of the poets, that of the philosophers, and that of 

^ See, e.g., pro Sestio, 15. 32 ; in Vatinium, 7. 18. 



324 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the statesman, of which the last must be accepted 
and acted on, whether it be true or not.^ Cicero 
could hardly have complained if this saying had been 
attributed to himself. 

This attitude of mind, the combination of perfect 
freedom of thought with full recognition of the 
legal obligations of the State and its citizens in 
matters of religion, is not difficult for any one to 
understand who is acquainted with the nature of 
the ius divinum and the priesthood administering it. 
That ius divinum was a part of the ius civile, the 
law of the Roman city-state; as the ius civile, 
exclusive of the ius divinum, regulated the relations 
of citizen to citizen, so did the ius divinum regulate 
the relations of the citizen to the deities of the 
community. The priesthoods administering this law 
consisted not of sacrificing priests, attached to the 
cult of a particular god and temple, but of lay 
officials in charge of that part of the law of the 
State ; it was no concern of theirs (so indeed they 
might quite well argue) whether the gods really 
existed or not, provided the law were maintained. 
When in 61 B.C. Clodius was caught in disguise at 
the women's festival of the Bona Dea, the pontifices 
declared the act to be nefas, — crime against the ius 
divinum ; but we may doubt whether any of those 
pontifices really believed in the existence of such a 
deity. The idea of the mos maiorum was still so 
strong in the mind of every true Roman, his con- 

^ Augustine, Civ. Dei, iv. 27. 



XI RELIGION 325 

servative instincts were so powerful, that long after 
all real life had left the divine inhabitants of his 
city, so that they survived only as the dead stalks 
of plants that had once been green and flourishing, 
he was quite capable of being horrified at any open 
contempt of them. And he was right, as Augustus 
afterwards saw clearly ; for the masses, who had no 
share in the education described in the sixth chapter, 
who knew nothing of Greek literature or philosophy, 
and were full of superstitious fancies, were already 
losing confidence in the authorities set over them, 
and in their power to secure the good -will of the 
gods and their favour in matters of material well- 
being. This is the only way in which we can 
satisfactorily account for the systematic efforts of 
Augustus to renovate the old religious rites and 
priesthoods, and we can fairly argue back from it to 
the tendencies of the generation immediately before 
him. He knew that the proletariate of Rome and 
Italy still beheved, as their ancestors had always 
believed, that state and individual would alike suffer 
unless the gods were properly propitiated ; and that 
in order to keep them quiet and comfortable the 
sense of duty to the gods must be kept alive even 
among those who had long ceased to believe in them. 
It was fortunate indeed for Augustus that he found 
in the great poet of Mantua one who was in some 
sense a prophet as well as a poet, who could urge the 
Roman by an imaginative example to return to a 
living pietas, — not merely to the old religious forms, 



326 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

but to the intelligent sense of duty to God and man 
which had built up his character and his empire. In 
Cicero's day there was also a great poet, he too in some 
sense a prophet ; but Lucretius could only appeal to 
the Roman to shake off the slough of his old religion, 
and such an appeal was at the time both futile and 
dangerous. Looking at the matter historically, and 
not theologically, we ought to sympathise with the 
attitude of Cicero and Scaevola towards the religion 
of the State. It was based on a statesmanlike 
instinct ; and had it been possible for that instinct to 
express itself practically in a positive pohcy like that 
of Augustus, instead of showing itself in philosophical 
treatises like the de Legihus, or on occasional moments 
of danger like that of the Bona Dea sacrilege, it is 
quite possible that much mischief might have been 
averted. But in that generation no one had the 
shrewdness or experience of Augustus, and no one 
but Julius had the necessary free hand ; and we may 
be almost sure that Julius, Pontifex Maximus though 
he was, was entirely unfitted by nature and experience 
to undertake a work that called for such delicate 
handling, such insight into the working of the 
ignorant Italian mind. 

This attitude of inconsistency and compromise 
must seem to a modern unsatisfactory and strained, 
and he turns with relief to the courageous out- 
spokenness of the great poem of Lucretius on the 
Nature of Things, of which the main object was to 
persuade the Romans to renounce for good all the 



V ;j 



XI 



RELIGION 327 



mass of superstition, in which he included the religion 
of the State, by which their minds were kept in a 
prison of darkness, terror, and ignorance. Lucretius 
took no part whatever in public life ; he could afford 
to be in earnest ; he felt no shadow of responsibility 
for the welfare of the State as such. The Epicurean 
tenets which he held so passionately had always 
ranked the individual before the community, and 
suggested a life of individual quietism ; Lucretius in 
his study could contemplate the "rerum natura" with- 
out troubling himself about the " natura hominum " 
as it existed in the Italy of his day. "Felix qui 
potuit rerum cognoscere causas," — so wrote of him 
his great successor and admirer, yet added, with a 
tinge of pathos which touches us even now, 
" Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestes." Even 
at the present day an uncompromising unbeliever 
may be touched by the simple worship, half pagan 
though it may seem to him, of a village in the 
Apennines ; but in the eyes of Lucretius all worship 
seemed prompted by fear and based on ignorance of 
natural law. Virgil's tender and sympathetic soul 
went out to the peasant as he prayed to his gods for 
plenty or prosperity, as it went out to all living 
creatures in trouble or in joy. 

But it is nevertheless true that Lucretius was a 
great religious poet. He was a prophet, in deadly 
earnest, calling men to renounce their errors both of 
thought and conduct. He saw around him a world 
full of wickedness and folly; a world of vanity, 



328 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

vexation, fear, ambition, cruelty, and lust. He saw 
men fearing death and fearing the gods ; overvaluing 
life, yet weary of it ; unable to use it well, because 
steeped in ignorance of the wonderful working of 
Nature.^ He saw them, as we have already seen 
them, the helpless victims of ambition and avarice, 
ever, like Sisyphus, rolling the stone uphill and never 
reaching the summit.^ Of cruelty and bloodshed in 
civil strife that age had seen enough, and on this 
too the poet dwells with bitter emphasis ; ^ on the 
unwholesome luxury and restlessness of the upper 
classes,* and on their unrestrained indulgence of 
bodily appetites. In his magnificent scorn he prob- 
ably exaggerated the evils of his day, yet we have 
seen enough in previous chapters to suggest that he 
was not a mere pessimist ; there is no trace in his 
poem of cynicism, or of a soured temperament. We 
may be certain that he was absolutely convinced of 
the truth of all he wrote. 

So far Lucretius may be called a rehgious poet, 
in that with profound conviction and passionate 
utterance he denounced the wickedness of his age, and, 
like the Hebrew prophets, called on mankind to put 
away their false gods and degrading superstitions, 
and learn the true secret of guidance in this life. It 
is only when we come to ask what that secret was, 
that we feel that this extraordinary man knew far too 

1 Cp. i. 63 foil. ; iii. 87 and 894 ; v. 72 and 1218 ; and many other 
passages. ^ iii. 995 foil. ; v. 1120 foil. 

» iii. 70 ; v. 1126. * ii. 22 foil. ; iii. 1003 ; v. 1116. 



XI RELIGION 329 

little of ordinary human nature to be either a religious 
reformer or an effective prophet : as Sellar has said of 
him/ he had no sympathy with human activity. His 
secret, the remedy for all the world's evil and misery, 
was only a philosophical creed, which he had learnt 
from Epicurus and Democritus. His profound belief 
in it is one of the most singular facts in literary 
history ; no man ever put such poetic passion into a 
dogma, and no such imperious dogma was ever built 
upon a scientific theory of the universe. He seems 
to have combined two Italian types of character, 
which never have been united before or since, — that of 
the ecclesiastic, earnest and dogmatic, seeing human 
nature from a doctrinal platform, not working and 
thinking with it ; and secondly the poetic type, of 
which Dante is the noblest example, perfectly clear 
and definite in inward and outward vision, and 
illuminating all that it touches with an indescribable 
glow of pure poetic imagination. 

Lucretius' secret then is knowledge,^ — not the 
dilettanteism of the day, but real scientific knowledge 
of a single philosophical attempt to explain the uni- 
verse, — the atomic theory of the Epicurean school. 
Democritus and Epicurus are the only saviours, — of 
this Lucretius never had the shadow of a doubt. As 
the result of this knowledge, the whole supernatural 
and spiritual world of fancy vanishes, together with 

^ RoTnan Poets of the Republic, p. 306. 

^ The secret may be found in the last 250 lines of Bk. iii., and at the 
beginning and end of Bk. v. 



330 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

all futile hopes or fears of a future life. The gods, if 
they exist, will cease to be of any importance to 
mankind, as having no interest in him, and doing him 
neither good nor harm. Chimaeras, portents, ghosts, 
death, and all that frightens the ignorant and paralyses 
their energies, will vanish in the pure hght of this 
knowledge ; man will have nothing to be afraid of 
but himself. Nor indeed need he fear himself when 
he has mastered "the truth." By that time, as the 
scales of fear fall from his eyes, his moral balance 
will be recovered; the blind man will see. What 
will he see ? What is the moral standard that will 
become clear to him, the sanction of right living that 
will grip his conscience ? 

It is simply the conviction that as this life is all we 
have in past, present, or future, it must he used well. 
After all then, Lucretius is reduced to ordinary moral 
suasion, and finds no new power or sanction that 
could keep erring human nature in the right path. 
And we must sadly allow that no real moral end is 
enunciated by him ; his ideal seems to be quietism in 
this life, and annihilation afterwards.^ It is a purely 
self- regarding rule of life. It is not even a social 
creed ; neither family nor State seems to have any 
part in it, much less the unfortunate in this life, the 
poor, and the suffering. The poet never mentions 
slavery, or the crowded populations of great cities. 
It might almost be called a creed of fatalism, in 
which Natura plays much the same part as Fortuna 

> 1 V. 1203 ; ii. 48-54. 



XI 



RELIGION 331 



did in the creed of many less noble spirits of that 
age.^ Nature fights on ; we cannot resist her, and 
cannot improve on her; it is better to acquiesce 
and obey than to try and rule her. 

Thus Lucretius' remedy fails utterly ; it is that of 
an aristocratic intellect, not of a saviour of mankind.^ 
So far as we know, it was entirely fruitless ; like the 
constitution of Sulla his contemporary, the doctrine 
of Lucretius roused no sense of loyalty in Eoman or 
Italian, because it was constructed with imperfect 
knowledge of the Roman and Italian nature. But it 
was a noble effort of a noble mind ; and, apart from 
its literary greatness, it has incidentally a lasting 
value for all students of religious history, as showing 
better than anything else that has survived from that 
age the need of a real consecration of morality by the 
life and example of a Divine man. 

Thus while the Roman statesman found it necessary 
to maintain the ius divinum without troubling him- 
self to attempt to put any new life into the details 
of the worship it prescribed, content to let much of it 
sink into oblivion as no longer essential to the good 
government of the State, the greatest poetical genius 
of the age was proclaiming in trumpet tones that if a 
man would make good use of his life he must abandon 
absolutely and without a scruple the old religious ideas 
of the Graeco-Roman world. But there was another 

1 V. 1129, 

^ " Philosophy has never touched the mass of mankind except through 
religion " {Decadence, by Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, p. 53). This is a truth of 
which Lucretius was profoundly, though not surprisingly, ignorant. 



332 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

school of thought which had long been occupied with 
these diflaculties, and had reached conclusions far 
better suited than the dogmatism of Lucretius to the 
conservative character of the Roman mind, for it 
found a place for the deities of the State, and therefore 
for the ius divinum, in a philosophical system already 
widely accepted by educated men. This school may 
be described as Stoic, though its theology was often 
accepted by men who did not actually call themselves 
Stoics ; for example, by Cicero himself, who, as an 
adherent of the New Academy, the school which 
repudiated dogmatism and occupied itself with 
dialectic and criticism, was perfectly entitled to 
adopt the tenets of other schools if he thought them 
the most convincing. Its most elaborate exponent 
in this period was Varro, and behind both Varro and 
Cicero there stands the great figure of the Rhodian 
Posidonius,^ of whose wTitings hardly anything has 
come down to us. It is worth while to trace briefly 
the history of this school at Rome, for it is in itself 
extremely interesting, as an attempt to reconcile the 
old theology — if the term may be used — with philo- 
sophical thought, and it probably had an appreciable 
influence on the later quasi-rehgious Stoicism of the 
Empire. 

We must go back for a moment to the period 
succeeding the war with Hannibal. The awful 
experience of that war had done much to discredit 
the old Roman religious system, which had been 

^ See above, p. 115. 



XI RELIGION 333 

found insufficient of itself to preserve the State. 
The people, excited and despairing, had been quieted 
by what may be called new religious prescriptions, 
innumerable examples of which are to be found in 
Livy's books. The Sibylline books were constantly 
consulted, and lectisternia, supplicationes, ludi, in 
which Greek deities were prominent, were ordered and 
carried out. Finally, in 204 B.C., there was brought to 
Kome the sacred stone of the Magna Mater Idaea, the 
great deity of Pessinus in Phrygia, and a festival was 
established in her honour, called by the Greek name 
Megalesia. All this means, as can be seen clearly 
from Livy's language,^ that the governing classes 
were trying to quiet the minds of the people by 
convincing them that no effort was being spared to 
set right their relations with the unseen powers ; 
they had invoked in vain their own local and native 
deities, and had been compelled to seek help else- 
where ; they had found their own narrow system of 
religion quite inadequate to express their religious 
experience of the last twenty years. And indeed 
that old system of religion never really recovered 
from the discredit thus cast on it. The temper of 
the people is well shown by the rapidity with which 
the orgiastic worship of the Greek Dionysus spread 
over Italy a few years later ; and the fact that it was 
allowed to remain, though under strict supervision, 
shows that the State religion no longer had the 
power to satisfy the cravings of the masses. And 

1 e.g. xxi. 62. 



334 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

the educated class too was rapidly coming under the 
influence of Greek thought, which could hardly act 
otherwise than as a solvent of the old religious ideas. 
Ennius, the great literary figure of this period, was 
the first to strike a direct blow at the popular belief 
in the efficacy of prayer and sacrifice, by openly 
declaring that the gods did not interest themselves 
in mankind,^— the same Epicurean doctrine preached 
afterwards by Lucretius. It may indeed be doubted 
whether this doctrine became popular, or acceptable 
even to the cultured classes ; but the fact remains 
that the same man who did more than any one before 
Virgil to glorify the Eoman character and dominion, 
was the first to impugn the belief that Eome owed 
her greatness to her divine inhabitants. 

But in the next generation there arrived in Eome 
a man whose teaching had so great an influence on the 
best type of educated Eoman that, as we have already 
said, he may almost be regarded as a missionary.^ We 
do not know for certain whether Eanaetius wrote or 
taught about the nature or existence of the gods ; 
but we do know that he discussed the question of 
divination ^ in a work Uepl 7rpovoLa<i, where he could 
hardly have avoided the subject. In any case the 
Stoic doctrines which he held, themselves ultimately 
derived from Elato and the Old Academy, were found 

^ Ribbeck, Fragm. Trag. Rom. p. 54 : Ego deum genus esse semper dixi 
et dicam coelitum, Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus. 

2 See above, p. 114, 

^ See H. N. Fowler, Panaetii et Hecatonis librorum fragmenta, p. 10 ; 
Hirzel, Untersuchungen zu Cicero's philosophischen Schriften, i. p. 194 foil. 



RELIGION 335 

capable in the hands of his great successor Posidonius 
of Ehodes of supplying a philosophical basis for the 
activity as well as the existence of the gods. These 
men, it must be repeated, were not merely professed 
philosophers, but men of the world, travellers, writing 
on a great variety of subjects ; they were profoundly 
interested, like Polybius, in the Eoman character and 
government ; they became intimate with the finer 
Eoman minds, from Scipio the younger to Cicero and 
Varro, and seem to have seen clearly that the old rigid 
Stoicism must be widened and humanised, and its 
ethical and theological aspects modified, if it were to 
gain a real hold on the practical Eoman understand- 
ing. We have already seen^ how their modified 
Stoic ethics acted for good on the best Eomans of 
our period. In theology also they left a permanent 
mark on Eoman thought ; Posidonius wrote a work 
on the gods, which formed the basis of the speculative 
part of Varro' s Antiquitates divinae, and almost 
certainly also of the second book of Cicero's de 
Natura Deorum} Other philosophers of the period, 
even if not professed Stoics, may have discussed the 
same subjects in their lectures and writings, arriving 
at conclusions of the same kind. 

It is chiefly from the fragments of Varro's work 
that we learn something of the Stoic attempt to 
harmonise the old religious beliefe with philosophic 

^ See above, p. 115. 

8 Schmekel, Die Mittlere Stoa, p. 85 foil. ; Hirzel, Vntersttchungen, etc., 
i. p. 194 foil. 



336 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

theories of the universe.^ Varro, following his 
teacher, held the Stoic doctrine of the animus mundi, 
the Divine principle permeating all material things, 
which, in combination with them, constitutes the 
universe, and is Nature, Reason, God, Destiny, or 
whatever name the philosopher might choose to give 
it. The universe is divine, the various parts of it 
are, therefore, also divine, in virtue of this informing 
principle. Now in the sixteenth book of his great 
work Varro co-ordinated this Stoic theory with the 
Graeco -Roman religion of the State as it existed in 
his time. The chief gods represented the partes 
mundi in various ways ; even the difference of sex 
among the deities was explained by regarding male 
gods as emanating from the heaven and female ones 
from the earth, according to a familiar ancient idea 
of the active and passive principle in generation. 
The Stoic doctrine of Sat/iove? was also utilised to 
find an explanation for semi -deities, lares, genii, 
etc., and thus another character of the old Italian 
religious mind was to be saved from contempt and 
oblivion. The old Italian tendency to see the super- 
natural manifesting itself in many different ways 
expressed by adjectival titles, e.g. Mars Silvanus, 
Jupiter Elicius, Juno Lucina, etc., also found an 
explanation in Varro's doctrine ; for the divine element 
existing in sky, earth, sea, or other parts of the 
mundus, and manifesting itself in many different 

1 The fragments are collected by R. Agahd, Leipzig, 1898. The great 
majority are found in St. Augustine, de Civitate Dei. 



XI RELIGION 337 

forms of activity, might be thus made obvious to the 
ordinary human intellect without the interposition 
of philosophical terms. 

At the head of the whole system was Jupiter, the 
greatest of Roman gods, whose title of Optimus 
Maximus might well have suggested that no other 
deity could occupy this place. Without him it 
would have been practically impossible for Varro to 
carry out his difficult and perilous task. Every 
Roman recognised in Jupiter the god who con- 
descended to dwell on the Capitol in a temple made 
with hands, and who, beyond all other gods, watched 
over the destinies of the Roman State ; every Roman 
also knew that Jupiter was the great god of the 
heaven above him, for in many expressions of his 
ordinary speech he used the god's name as a synonym 
for the open sky.^ The position now accorded to the 
heaven -god in the new Stoic system is so curious 
and interesting that we must dwell on it for a 
moment. 

Varro held, or at any rate taught, that Jupiter 
was himself that soul of the world (animus mundi) 
which fills and moves the whole material universe.^ 
He is the one universal causal agent,^ from whom all 

^ As Wissowa says (Religion und Kultus der Bomer, p. 100), Jupiter does 
not appear in Roman language and literature as a personality who thunders 
or rains, but rather as the heaven itself combining these various manifest- 
ations of activity. The most familiar illustration of the usage alluded to 
in the text is the line of Horace in Odes i. 1. 25 : "manet sub love frigido 
venator." 

^ ap. Aug. Civ. Dei, iv. 11. ' lb. vii. 9. 

Z 



338 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

the forces of nature are derived;^ or he may be 
called, in language which would be intelligible to 
the ordinary Roman, the universal Genius.^ Further, 
he is himself all the other gods and goddesses, who 
may be described as parts, or powers, or virtues, 
existing in him."'' And Varro makes it plain that he 
wishes to identify this great god of gods with the 
Jupiter at Rome, whose temple was on the Capitol ; 
St. Augustine quotes him as holding that the Romans 
had dedicated the Capitol to Jupiter, who by his 
spirit breathes life into everything in the universe : * 
or in less philosophical language, " The Romans wish 
to recognise Jupiter as king of gods and men, and 
this is shown by his sceptre and his seat on the 
Capitol." Thus the god who dwelt on the Capitol, 
and in the temple which was the centre-point of the 
Roman Empire, was also the life-giving ruler and 
centre of the whole universe. Nay, he goes one step 
further, and identifies him with the one God of the 
monotheistic peoples of the East, and in particular 
with the God of the Jews.^ 

Thus Varro had arrived, with the help of Posi- 
donius and the Stoics, at a monotheistic view of the 
Deity, which is at the same time a kind of pantheism, 
and yet, strange to say, is able to accommodate itself 
to the polytheism of the Graeco-Roman world. But 

^ ap. Aug. Civ. Dei, vii. 13 : animus mundi is here so called, but 
evidently identified with Jupiter. 

2 lb. vii. 9. 3 lb. iv. 11, 13. 

* Aug. de consensu evangel, i. 23, 24, Cp. Civ. Dei, iv. 9. 
5 lb. i. 22. 30 ; Civ. Dei, xix. 22. 



^ f 



XI 



^ RELIGION 339 



witliout Jupiter, god of the heaven both for Greeks 
and Romans, and now too in the eyes of both peoples 
the god who watched over the destiny of the Roman 
Empire, this wonderful feat could not have been 
performed. The identification of the heaven-god 
with the animus mundi of the Stoics was not indeed 
a new idea ; it may be traced up Stoic channels even 
to Plato. What is really new and astonishing is 
that it should have been possible for a conservative 
Roman like Varro, in that age of carelessness and 
doubt, to bring the heaven-god, so to speak, down 
to the Roman Capitol, where his statue was to be seen 
sitting between Juno and Minerva, and yet to teach 
the doctrine that he was the same deity as the Jewish 
Jehovah, and that both were identical with the 
Stoic animus mundi. 

But did Varro also conceive of this Jupiter as 
a deity "making for righteousness," or acting as a 
sanction for morality ? It would not have been 
impossible or unnatural for a Roman so to think of 
him, for of all the Roman deities Jupiter is the one 
whose name from the most ancient times had been 
used in oaths and treaties, and whose numen was 
felt to be violated by any public or private breach 
of faith. ^ We cannot tell how far Varro himself 
followed out this line of thought, for the fragments 
of his great work are few and far between. But 
we know that the Roman Stoics saw in that same 
universal Power or Mind which Varro identified with 

^ See Wissowa, Religion und EitUus, p. 103. 



340 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Jupiter the source and strength of law, and therefore 
of morality ; here it is usually called reason, ratio, 
the working of the eternal and* immutable Mind of 
the universe. " True law is right reason," says 
Cicero in a noble passage ; ^ and goes on to teach 
that this law transcends all human codes of law, em- 
bracing and sanctioning them all ; and that the spirit 
inherent in it, which gives it its universal force, is 
God Himself. In another passage, written towards 
the end of his life, and certainly later than the pub- 
lication of Varro's work, he goes further and identifies 
this God with Jupiter.^ " This law," he says, " came 
into being simultaneously with the Divine Mind" 
(i.e. the Stoic Keason) : " wherefore that true and 
paramount law, commanding and forbidding, is the 
right reason of almighty Jupiter" (summi lovis). Once 
more, in the first book of his treatise on the gods, 
he quotes the Stoic Chrysippus as teaching that the 
eternal Power, which is as it were a guide in the 
duties of life, is Jupiter himself.^ It is characteristic 
of the Roman that he should think, in speculations 
like these, rather of the law of his State than of the 
morality of the individual, as emanating from that 
Right Reason to which he might give the name of 
Jupiter : I have been unable to find a passage in 

^ de Rep. iii. 22. See above, p. 117. 

2 de Legibus, ii. 10. 

' de Nat. Deor. i. 15. 40 : "idem etiam legis perpetuae et eternae vim, 
quae quasi dux vitae et magistra oflficiorum sit, lovem dicit esse, eandemque 
fatalem necessitatem appellat, sempitemam rerum futurarum veritatem." 
Chrysippus of course was speaking of the Greek Zeus. 



XI 



RELIGION 341 



which Cicero attributes to this deity the sanction for 
individual goodness, though there are many that 
assert the belief that justice and the whole system 
of social life depend on the gods and our belief in 
them.^ But the Roman had never been conscious 
of individual duty, except in relation to his State, or 
to the family, which was a living cell in the organism 
of the State. In his eyes law was rather the source 
of morality than morality the cause and the reason 
of law ; and as his religion was a part of the law of 
his State, and thus had but an indirect connection 
with morality, it would not naturally occur to him that 
even the great Jupiter himself, thus glorified as the 
Reason in the universe, could really help him in the 
conduct of his life qua individual. It is only^as the 
source of legalised morality that we can think of 
Varro's Jupiter as " making for righteousness." 

Less than twenty-five years after Cicero's death, 
in the imagination of the greatest of Roman poets, 
Jupiter was once more brought before the Roman 
world, and now in a form comprehensible by all 
educated men, whether or no they had dabbled in 
philosophy. What are we to say of the Jupiter of 
the Aeneid ? We do not need to read far in the first 
book of the poem to find him spoken of in terms 
which remind us of Varro : "0 qui res hominumque 
deumque Aeternis regis imperils," are the opening 
words of the address of Venus; and when she has 
finished, 

* e.g. de Off. iii. 28 ; de Nat. Dear. i. 116. 



342 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

Olli subridens hominum sator atque deorum 
Vultu, quo caelum tempestatesque serenat, 
Oscula libavit natae, dehinc talia fatur ; 
" Parce metu, Cytherea, manent immota tuorum 
Fata tibi." 

Jupiter is here, as in Varro's system, the prime cause 
and ruler of all things, and he also holds in his hand 
the destiny of Eome and the fortunes of the hero 
who was to lay the first foundation of Rome's 
dominion. It is in the knowledge of his will that 
Aeneas walks, with hesitating steps, in the earlier 
books, in the later ones with assured confidence, 
towards the goal that is set before him. But the 
lines just quoted serve well to show how difi'erent is 
the Jupiter of Virgil from the universal deity of the 
Roman Stoic. Beyond doubt Virgil had felt the 
power of the Stoic creed; but he was essaying an 
epic poem, and he could not possibly dispense with 
the divine machinery as it stood in his great Homeric 
model. His Jupiter is indeed, as has been lately 
said,^ *' a great and wise god, free from the tyrannical 
and sensuous characteristics of the Homeric Zeus," 
in other words, he is a Roman deity, and sometimes 
acts and speaks like a grave Roman consul of the 
olden time. But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, 
a purely human conception of a personal god-king ; 
in these lines he smiles on his daughter Venus 
and kisses her. This is the reason why Virgil has 
throughout his poem placed the Fates, or Destiny, 
in close relation to him, without definitely explaining 

^ Glover, Studies m Virgil, p. 275. 



tf i! 



XI RELIGION 343 

that relation. Fate, as it appears in the Aeneid, is 
the Stoic €i/jiapfiev7] applied to the idea of Rome and 
her Empire ; that Stoic conception could not take 
the form of Jupiter, as in Yarro's hands, for the god 
had to be modelled on the Homeric pattern, not on 
the Stoic. It is perhaps not going too far to say 
that the god, as a theological conception, never 
recovered from this treatment ; any chance he ever 
had of becoming the centre of a real religious system 
was destroyed by the Aeneid, the pietas of whose 
hero is indeed nominally due to him, but in reality 
to the decrees of Fate.^ 

While philosophers and poets were thus performing 
intellectual and imaginative feats with the gods of 
the State, the strong tendency to superstition, un- 
tutored fear of the supernatural, which had always 
been characteristic of the Italian peoples, so far from 
losing power, was actually gaining it, and that not 
only among the lower classes. As Lucretius mock- 
ingly said, even those who think and speak with 
contempt of the gods will in moments of trouble 
slay black sheep and sacrifice them to the Manes. 
This feeling of fear or nervousness, which lies at the 
root of the meaning of the word religio,^ had been 

^ It is interesting to note that in the religious revival of Augustus 
Jupiter by no means has a leading place. See Carter, Religion of Nuvna, 
p. 160, where, however, the attitude of Augustus towards the great god 
is perhaps over-emphasised. On the relation of Virgil's Jupiter to Fate, 
see E. Norden, Virgils epische Technik, p. 286 foil. Seneca, it is worth 
noting, never mentions Jupiter as the centre of the Stoic Pantheon. — Dill, 
Roman Society from Nero to M. Aurelius, p. 331. 

^ See an article by the author in Eihhert Journal, July 1907, p. 847. 



344 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

quieted in the old days by the prescriptions of the 
pontifices and their jus divinum, but it was always 
ready to break out again ; as we have seen, in the 
long and awful struggle of the Hannibalic war, it 
was necessary to go far beyond the ordinary pharma- 
copoeia within reach of the priesthoods in order to 
convince the people that all possible means were 
being taken for their salvation. Again, in this last 
age of the Eepublic, there are obvious signs that 
both ignorant and educated were affected by the 
gloom and uncertainty of the times. Increasing 
uncertainty in the political world, increasing doubt 
in the world of thought, very naturally combined to 
produce an emotional tendency which took different 
forms in men of different temperament. We can 
trace this (1) in the importance attached to omens, 
portents, dreams ; (2) in a certain vague thought of 
a future life, which takes a positive shape in the 
deification of human beings ; (3) at the close of the 
period, in something approaching to a sense of sin, 
of neglected duty, bringing down upon State and 
individual the anger of the gods. 

1. If we glance over the latter part of the book of 
prodigies, compiled by the otherwise unknown writer 
Julius Obsequens from the records of the pontifices 
quoted in Livy's history, we can get a fair idea of 
the kind of portent that was troubling the popular 
mind. They are much the same as they always 
had been in Roman history, — earthquakes, monstrous 
births, temples struck by lightning, statues over- 



XI RELIGION 345 

thrown, wolves entering the city, and so on ; they 
are extremely abundant in the terrible years of the 
Social and Civil Wars, become less frequent after the 
death of Sulla, and break out again in full force with 
the murder of Caesar. They were reported to the 
pontifices from the places where they were supposed 
to have occurred, and if thought worthy of expiation 
were entered in the pontifical books. We may 
suppose that they were sent in chiefly by the unedu- 
cated. But among men of education we have many 
examples of this same nervousness, of which two 
or three must suffice. Sulla, as we know from his 
own Memoirs, which were used directly or indirectly 
by Plutarch, had a strong vein of superstition in his 
nature, and made no attempt to control it. In 
dedicating his Memoirs to Lucullus he advised him 
" to think no course so safe as that which is enjoined 
by the Saificov (perhaps his genius) in the night " ; ^ 
and Plutarch tells us several tales of portents on 
which he acted, evidently drawn from this same 
autobiography. We are told of him that he always 
carried a small image of Apollo, which he kissed from 
time to time, and to which he prayed silently in 
moments of danger.^ Again, Cicero tells us a curious 
story of himself, Varro, and Cato, which shows that 
those three men of philosophical learning were quite 
liable to be frightened by a prophecy which to us 
would not seem to have much claim to respect.^ He 

^ Plut. Sulla, 6. ^ Valerius Maximus ii. 3. 

8 de Div. i. 32. 68. 



346 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

tells how when the three were at Dyrrachium, after 
Caesar's defeat there and the departure of the armies 
into Thessaly, news was brought them by the com- 
mander of the Rhodian fleet that a certain rower 
had foretold that within thirty days Greece would 
be weltering in blood ; how all three were terribly 
frightened, and how a few days later the news of 
the battle at Pharsalia reached them. Lastly, we 
all remember the vision which appeared to Brutus 
on the eve of the battle of Philippi, of a huge and 
fearsome figure standing by him in silence, which 
Shakespeare has made into the ghost of Caesar and 
used to unify his play. According to Plutarch, the 
Epicurean Cassius, as Lucretius would have done, 
attempted to convince his friend on rational grounds 
that the vision need not alarm him, but apparently 
in vain.^ 

2. Lucretius had denied the doctrine of the im- 
mortality of the soul, as the cause of so much of the 
misery which he believed it to be his mission to avert. 
Caesar, in the speech put into his mouth by Sallust, 
in the debate on the execution of the conspirators on 
December 5, 63, seems to be of the same opinion, and 
as Cicero alludes to his words in the speech with 
which he followed Caesar, we may suppose that 
Sallust was reporting him rightly.^ The poet and 
the statesman were not unlike in the way in which 
they looked at facts ; both were of clear strong vision, 
without a trace of mysticism. But such men were 

1 Plut, Brutus, 36, 37. ^ Sail. Cat. 51 ; Cic. Cat. iv, 4. 7. 



RELIGION 347 

the exception rather than the rule ; Cicero probably 
represents better the average thinking man of his 
time. Cicero was indeed too full of life, too deeply 
interested in the living world around him, to think 
much of such questions as the immortality of the 
soul ; and as a professed follower of the Academic 
school, he assuredly did not hold any dogmatic 
opinion on it. He was at no time really affected by 
Pythagoreanism, like his friend Nigidius Figulus, 
whose works, now lost, had a great vogue in the 
later years of Cicero's life, and much influence on the 
age that followed. In the first book of his Tusculan 
Disputations Cicero discusses the question from the 
Academic point of view, coming to no definite 
conclusion, except that whether we are immortal or 
not we must be grateful to death for releasing us 
from the bondage of the body. This book was 
written in the last year of his life ; but ten years 
earlier, in the beautiful myth, imitated from the 
myths of Plato, which he appended to his treatise de 
Republican he had emphatically asserted the doctrine. 
There the spirit of the elder Scipio appears to his 
great namesake, Cicero's ideal Roman, and assures 
him that the road to heaven (caelum) lies open to 
those who do their duty in this life, and especially their 
duty to the State. " Know thyself to be a god ; as the 
god of gods rules the universe, so the god within us 
rules the body, and as that great god is eternal, so 
does an eternal soul govern this frail body." ^ 

1 Cic. de Rep. iv. 24. 



348 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

The Somnium Scipionis was an inspiration, written 
undfer the influence of Plato at one of those emotional 
moments of Cicero's life which make it possible to 
say of him that there was a religious element in his 
mind.^ Some years later the poignancy of his grief 
at the death of his daughter Tullia had the efiect of 
putting him again in a strong emotional mood. For 
many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of 
the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, 
forbidding even his young wife and her mother to 
come near him ; brooding, as it would seem, on the 
survival of the godlike element in his daughter. 
These sad meditations took a practical form which at 
first astonishes us, but is not hard to understand 
when we have to come to know Cicero well, and to 
follow the tendencies of thought in these years. He 
might erect a tomb to her memory, — but that would 
not satisfy him ; it would not express his feeling that 
the immortal godlike spark within her survived. He 
earnestly entreats Atticus to find and buy him a piece 
of ground where he can build a fanum, i.e. a shrine, 
to her spirit. " I wish to have a shrine built, and 
that wish cannot be rooted out of my heart. I am 
anxious to avoid any likeness to a tomb ... in 
order to attain as nearly as possible to an apotheosis." ^ 
A little further on he calls these foolish ideas ; but 
this is doubtless only because he is writing to Atticus, 
a man of the world, not given to emotion or mysticism. 

^ Beid, The Academics of Cicero, Introduction, p. 18. 
2 ad Att. xii. 36. 



XI RELIGION 349 

Cicero is really speaking the language of the Italian 
mind, for the moment free from philosophical specula- 
tion ; he believes that his beloved dead lived on, 
though he could not have proved it in argument. So 
firmly does he believe it that he wishes others to know 
that he believes it, and insists that the shrine shall be 
erected in a frequented place ! ^ 

Though the great Dictator did not believe in 
another world, he consented at the end of his life to 
become Jupiter Julius, and after his death was duly 
canonised as Divus, and had a temple erected to him. 
But the many-sided question of the deification of the 
Caesars cannot be discussed here ; it is only mentioned 
as showing in another way the trend of thought in 
this dark age of Eoman history. Whatever some 
philosophers may have thought, there cannot be a 
doubt that the ordinary Eoman believed in the god- 
head of Julius.^ 

3. We saw in an earlier chapter with what gay 
and heedless frivolity young men like Caelius were 
amusing themselves even on the very eve of civil war. 
In strange contrast with this is the gloom that over- 
spread all classes during the war itself, and more 
especially after the assassination of the Dictator. 
Caesar seemed irresistible and godlike, and men were 
probably beginning to hope for some new and more 
stable order of things, when he was suddenly struck 
down, and the world plunged again into confusion and 

1 ad Att. xii, 37. 
^ Suetonius, Jul. 88. See E. Kornemann in Klio, vol. i. p. 95. 



350 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap. 

doubt ; and it was not till after the final victory of 
Octavian at Actium, and the destruction of the 
elements of disunion with the deaths of Antony and 
Cleopatra, that men really began to hope for better 
times. The literature of those melancholy years 
shows distinct signs of the general depression, which 
was perhaps something more than weariness and 
material discomfort ; there was almost what we may 
call a dim sense of sin, or at least of moral evil, such 
a feeling, though far less real and intense, as that 
which their prophets aroused from time to time in the 
Jewish people, and one not unknown in the history of 
Hellas. *->.\ 

The most touching expression of this feeling is to 
be found in the preface which Livy prefixed to his 
history — a wonderful example of the truth that when 
a great prose writer is greatly moved, his language re- 
flects his emotion in its beauty and earnestness. Every 
student knows the sentence in which he describes the 
gradual decay of all that was good in the Roman 
character : " donee ad haec tempora, quibus nee vitia 
nostra nee remedia pati possumus, perventum est " ; 
but it is not every student who can recognise in it a 
real sigh of despair, an unmistakable token of the 
sadness of the age.^ In the introductory chapters 
which serve the purpose of prefaces to the Jugurtha 
and Catiline of Sallust, we find something of the 

^ We do not know exactly when this preface was written. Prefaces are 
now composed, as a rule, when a work is finished : but this does not seem to 
have been the practice in antiquity, and internal evidence is here strongly in 
favour of an early date. 



XI RELIGION 351 

same sad tone, but it does not ring true like Livy's 
exordium ; Sallust was a man of altogether coarser 
fibre, and seems to be rather assuming than expressing 
the genuine feeling of a saddened onlooker. In one 
of his earliest poems, written perhaps after the 
Perusian war of 41 B.c.^ even the lively Horace was 
moved to voice the prevailing depression, fancifully 
urging that the Italian people should migrate, like 
the Phocaeans of old, to the far west, where, as 
Sertorius had been told in Spain, lay the islands of 
the blest, where the earth, as in the golden age, yields 
all her produce untilled : 

luppiter ilia piae secrevit litora genti ^^ 
Ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum ; 

Aere, dehinc ferro duravit saecula, quorum 
Piis secunda vate me datur fuga. 

It may be, as has recently been suggested, that 
the famous fourth Eclogue of Virgil, " the Messianic 
Eclogue," was in some sense meant as an answer to 
this poem of Horace. " There is no need," he seems 
to say in that poem, written in the year 39, "to seek 
the better age in a fabled island of the west. It is 
here and now with us. The period upon which Italy 
is now entering more than fulfils in real life the dream 
of a Golden Age. A marvellous child is even now 
coming into the world who will see and inaugurate 
an era of peace and prosperity : darkness and despair 
will after a while pass entirely away, and a regenerate 
Italy, — regenerate in religion and morals as in fertility 

1 I^ode 16. 54 ; cp. 30 foil. 



352 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME chap, xi 

and wealth, — will lead the world in a new era of 
happiness and good government." ^ 

But the Golden Age, so fondly hoped for, so 
vaguely and poetically conceived, was not to come in 
the sense in which Virgil, or any other serious thinker 
of the day, could dream of it. I may conclude this 
chapter with a few sentences which express this most 
truly and eloquently. " When there is a fervent 
aspiration after better things, springing from a strong 
feeling of human brotherhood, and a firm belief in the 
goodness and righteousness of God, such aspiration 
carries with it an invincible confidence that some 
how, soi]&e:,i,vhere, some when, it must receive its com- 
plete fulfilment, for it is prompted by the Spirit which 
fills and orders the Universe throughout its whole 
development. But if the human organ of inspiration 
goes on to fix the how, the where, and the when, and 
attributes to some nearer object the glory of the final 
-blessedness, then it inevitably falls into such mistakes 
as Virgil's, and finds its golden age in the rule of the 
Caesars (which was indeed an essential feature of 
Christianity), or perhaps, as in later days, in the 
establishment of socialism or imperialism. Well for 
the seer if he remembers that the kingdom of God is 
within us, and that the true golden age must have its 
foundation in penitence for misdoing, and be built up 
in righteousness and lovingkindness." ^ 

* Sir W. M. Ramsay, (quoted in Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, p. 54. 
^ Dr. J. B. Mayor, in Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, p. 118 foil. 



EPILOGUE 

These sketches of social life at the close of the 
Kepublican period have been written without any 
intention of proving a point, or any pre-conceived 
idea of the extent of demoralisation, social, moral, or 
political, which the Eoman people had then reached. 
But a perusal of Mr. Balfour's suggestive lecture on 
" Decadence " has put me upon making a very succinct 
diagnosis of the condition of the patient whose life 
and habits I have been describing. The Eomans, and 
the Italians, with whom they were now socially and 
politically amalgamated, were not in the last two 
centuries B.C. an old or worn-out people. It is at 
any rate certain that for a century after the war with 
Hannibal Eome and her allies, under the guidance of 
the Eoman senate, achieved an amount of work in 
the way of war and organisation such as has hardly 
been performed by any people before or since ; and 
even in the period dealt with in this book, in spite of 
much cause for misgiving at home, the work done by 
Eoman and Italian armies both in East and West 
shows beyond doubt that under healthy discipline the 
native vigour of the population could assert itself. 

353 2 A 



354 SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 

We must not forget, however severely we may con- 
demn the way in which the work was done, that it is 
to these armies, in all human probability, that we owe 
not only the preservation of Graeco-Italian culture 
and civilisation, but the opportunity for further 
progress. The establishment of definite frontiers by 
Pompeius and Caesar, and afterwards by Augustus 
and Tiberius, brought peace to the region of the Medi- 
terranean, and with it made possible the develop- 
ment of Roman law and the growth of a new and 
life-giving religion. 

But peoples, like individuals, if ofiered opportunities 
of doing themselves physical or moral damage, are 
only too ready to accept them. Time after time in 
these chapters we have had to look back to the age 
following the war with Hannibal in order to see what 
those opportunities were ; and in each case we have 
found the acceptance rapid and eager. We have seen 
wealth coming in suddenly, and misused ; slave-labour 
available in an abnormal degree, and utilised with 
results in the main unfortunate ; the population of 
the city increasing far too quickly, yet the difficulties 
arising from this increase either ignored or mis- 
apprehended. We have noticed the decay of whole- 
some family life, of the useful influence of the Roman 
matron, of the old forms of the State religion ; the 
misconception of the true end of education, the result 
partly of Greek culture, partly of political life ; and 
to these may perhaps be added an increasing liability 
to diseases, and especially to malaria, arising from 



EPILOGUE 355 

economic blunders in Italy and insanitary conditions 
of life in the city. All these opportunities of damage 
to the fibre of the people had been freely accepted, 
and with the result that in the age of Cicero we can- 
not mistake the signs and symptoms of degeneracy. 

But it would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion 
that this degeneracy had as yet gone too far to be 
arrested. It was assuredly not that degeneracy of 
senility which Mr. Balfour is inclined to postulate as 
an explanation of decadence. So far as I can judge, 
the Eomans were at that stage when, in spite of 
unhealthy conditions of life and obstinate persistence 
in dangerous habits, it was not too late to reform and 
recover. To me the main interest of the history of 
the early Empire lies in seeking the answer to the 
question how far that recovery was made. If these 
chapters should have helped any student to prepare 
the ground for the solution of this problem their 
object will have been fully achieved. 



2a2 



INDEX 



Accius, 305, 306, 307, 312 

Aedicula, 29 

Aediles, the, 36, 295, 296 

Aemilia, Via. See Via Aemilia 

Aemilius, Pons. See Pons Aemilius 

Aeneas, 2, 141, 342 

Aerarium, the, 20, 67 

Aesopus, the actor, 307, 313-315 

Afranius, 305, 306 

Africa, province of, 36 

Agrippa, 40 

Alexandria, 35 

Alexis (Atticus's slave), 224 

Amafinius, 122 

Amhitu, lex de, 303 

Anio, the river, 41 

Anna Perenna, festival of, 289 

Annona, 38 

Antioch, 35 

Antiochus (the physician), 270 

Antium, Cicero's villa at, 259 

Antony, 212, 256 

Apodyferium, 244, 255, 275, 276 

Apollinares, Ludi. See Ludi ApoUi- 

nares 
Apollonia, 35 

Appia, Via. See Via Appia 
Appius Claudius Caecus, 41 
Aqua Appia, 41 
Aqua Tepula, 42 
Aqueducts, 40, 41, 42 
Ara maxima, 2, 13 
Ara Pacis, 108 
Argentarii, 80 ff. 
Argiletum, the, 3, 18, 25, 26 
Arpinum, Cicero's villa at, 253, 260 
Ars amatoria (Ovid's), 238, 309 
Arval brothers, the, 6, 321 
Arx, the, In., 17 
Asia, province of, 88 
Astura, Cicero's villa at, 259, 348 
Atellanae, fabulae. See Fabulae Atel- 

lanae 



Atrium, 241, 254, 278 ; sutarium, 53 ; 
Vestae, 19 

Atticus, house of, 25 ; wealth of, 
62-64; as money-lender, 83-84; 
the sister of, 152 ; the slave of, 
224 ; Cicero's letters to, passim 

Augury, 322, 323 

Augustus, alleged proposal of, to 
remove the capital, 9 ; attitude of, 
towards plehs urbana, 38 ; water- 
supply under, 40 ; the grandfather 
of, 81 n. ; as a social reformer, 95 ; 
marriage laws of, 149-150 ; furthers 
public comfort, 237-238 ; restora- 
tion of temples by, 321 ; attempts 
at religious revival, 325 

Aventine hill, 3, 4, 14, 24, 41, 55 

Baiae, 257 

Balbus, Cornelius, the younger, 308 

Bankruptcy laws, 57, 59 

Basilicae, the, 19, 74 

Baths, public, 276 n. 

Bath-rooms, 255, 275 

Bauli, 257 

Bithynia, province of, 77-79, 94 

Blanditia., 271 

Bona Dea, festival of, 324, 326 

Boscoreale, 261, 276 

Brutus (Cicero's), 110 

Brutus, Decimus, 89 n., 125, 346 

Bulla, 193 

Byzantium, 9 

Caecilius, 228, 305 

Caelian hill, 4, 15, 24 

Caelius Antipater, 111 

Caelius (M.) Rufus, 29, 126-128 ff., 

155, 161, 194, 195, 221, 296, 297 

and passim 
Caesar, Julius, alleged proposal of, 

to remove the capital, 9 ; extends 

one of the Basilicae, 19 ; reduces 



357 



358 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



corn gratuities, 38 ; regulations of, 
for the government of the city, 55 ; 
debts of, 62 ; character of, 101-102 ; 
as historian. 111 ; joined by Caelius, 
130 ; restores credit in Italy, 131 ; 
and Cleopatra, 158 ; clemency of, 
161 ; sale of prisoners by, 207 ; 
dismisses surrendered armies, 208 ; 
foundation at Corinth by, 228 ; 
entertained by Cicero, 275 ; habits 
of, 283 ; as aedile, 296 ; summons 
Publilius to Rome, 317 ; as Ponti- 
fex Maximus, 326 ; speech of, in 
Sallust, 346 ; consents to be deified, 
349 ; and passim 
Calceus, 53 

Caldarium, 244, 255, 275, 276 
Calvus, 128 
Camillus, 9 
Campagna, the, 15 
Campania, 6, 7, 161 
Campus Martius, 3, 22, 194, 289, 300, 

311 
Caninius, 274 

Capena, Porta. See Porta Capena 
Capital at Rome, 65 ff. 
Capitol, the, 2, 3, 15, 338 
Capitoline hill, In., 4, 17 
Capua, 7 

Carceres, the, 13, 301 
Carinae, the, 25 
Carmentalis, Porta. See Porta Car- 

mentalis 
Castella, 42 

Castor, temple of, 19, 211 
Catiline, 128, 210, 226, 228 
Cato major, 68, 103, 176, 177, 191, 

212, 217-219, 280 
Cato minor, 2, 76, 109, 113 n., 115, 

116, 120, 122, 158, 171 ff. 
Catullus, 109, 128, 143, 155 
Catulus the elder. 111 
Cena, 273, 277, 281, 283, 284 
Censor, the, 71, 229, 310 
Censoria locatio, 71 
Ceres, 136 

Ceriales, Ludi. See Ludi Ceriales 
Cethegus, 157 
Chariot-racing, 301, 302 
Chrysippus, 340 

Cicero, birthplace of, 10 ; house of, 
17 ; borrows money, 62 ; as a man 
of business, 74 ff. ; and the publi- 
cani, 76 ff. ; relation of, to the 
governing aristocracy, 97 ff. ; letters 
of, 112 ; as a philosopher, 113 ff. ; 
and Clodia, 155 ; views on educa- 
tion, 174 ff. ; influence of philoso- 



phers upon, 199 ; and the slave 
question, 207 ; and the use of slaves 
for seditious purposes, 226 ; villas 
of, 251 ff. ; undertakes the Ludi 
Romani, 296 ; "eligious views of, 
322, 323, 326 ; and passim 
Cicero, Marcus, 152, 227 
Cicero, Quintus, 25, 89, 152, 173, 

174, 227, 253, 254, 308 
Cilician pirates, 208 
Circus Flaminius, 22, 293 
Circus Maximus, 13, 14, 292, 293, 

299, 300, 301 
Cleopatra, 158, 212 
Clients, 269 
Clivus Capitolinus, 20 
Clivus sacer, 3, 17, 18 
Cloaca maxima, 12, 18 
Clodia, 129, 155, 249 
Clodius, 20, 38, 48, 226, 324 
Cluvius, 257 
Coemptio, 138, 139, 140 
Coenaculum, 29 
Coinage, 80 ff. 

Collegia, 45, 46, 215 
CoUine gate, Sulla's victory at the, 
294 

Colosseum, the, 16 

Columella, 220, 278 

Comedy, 305 ff. 

Comissatio, 282 

Comitium, the, 19 

Commercii, ius, 138 n. 

Covipluvium, 241 

Concordia, temple of, 20 

Condudicii, 219 

Confarreatio, 136-139, 147 ». 

Goniugalia praecepta (Plutarch's), 145 

Gonnubii, ius, 138 n. 

Constantine, arch of, 16 

Consul, the, 21, 58, 229 

Census, altar of, 13, 300 

Contubernium, 193, 194 

Convivium, 282 

Oopa C'YivgiVs"), 51 

Corfinium, 7 

Cornelia, 153, 154 

Cornelius, 126 

Crassus, 31, 62, 87, 108, 296 

Cumae, Cicero's villa at, 257 

Curia, the, 19, 20, 311 

Curio, 304 

Debtors, 85, 86 

Dcdamatio, 197, 202 

Beduetio, 142 

Democritus, 329 

Deorxmi, De Natura (Cicero's), 335 



INDEX 



359 



Diana, temple of, 14 
Die natali, De (Censorinus's), 266 
Diffarreatio, 147 n. 
Diomedes, villa of, 254, 255 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 228, 229 
Dionysus, worship of, 333 
Di J'enates. See Penates 
Diphilus, the actor, 306 
Divorce, 147 
Dolia, 54 

Domus, 28, 29, 237 ff. 
Dos, 144 n. 
Drama, the, 305 ff. 
Dyrrhachium, importation of corn 
into, 35 ; battle of, 346 

Egypt, 91, 92 

Emetics, use of, .283, 284 

Ennius, 104, 305 

Epicureanism, 121-124, 327 

Epicurus, 329 

Epuluyn Jovis, 291, 292 

Equester, Ordo. See Ordo equester 

Equirria, 300 

Equites. See Ordo equester 

Ergastula, 233 

Esquiline hill, 4, 16 n., 24 

Etruscans, the, 5, 9 

Evander, 2, 3, 4 

Exedra, 242, 244, 255 

Fabius, arch of, 17 
Fabri ferrarii, 54 
FabulaeAtellanae, 315, 316 ; palliatae, 

305 ; togatae, 305, 317 
Familiae urbanae, 216 
Fate, 342, 343 
Fercula, 292 
Feriae, 286 ff. 
Festa, 285 ff, 
Figuli, 54 

Figulus, Nigidius, 347 
Flaccus, Verrius, 228 
Flamen Dialis, 39, 136, 137, 321; 

Quirinalis, 288 n. 
Flaminius, 293 
Flammeum, 141 

Florales, Ludi. See Ludi Florales 
Foeneratores, 81 
Foenus, 81 

Formiae, Cicero's villa at, 256, 258 
Forum Boarium, 2, 12, 18, 22, 301 
Forum Romanum, 3, 13, 15, 17-19, 74, 

75, 245, 246, 271, 272, 303, 309 
Friedlander, 214 
Frontinus, 40, 42 n, 
FuUones, 52 



Funeral games, 303, 304 
Furrina, the grove of, 14 

Gabinius, 92 

Gellius, Aulus, 81 

Genseric, 5 

Gilds. See Collegia 

Gladiators, 302 ff. 

Gracchus, Gains, 14, 36-39, 61, 107, 

108, 272 
Gracchus, Tiberius, 149, 295 
Grammaticus, 187, 189 
Grassatores, 209 
Greeks, 183 

Hannibal, 5, 65 
Hercules, 2, 3, 13, 141 
Hirtius, 111 w. 
Konoruvi, ius, 138 n. 
Horace, 188, 268, 351 
Hortensius, 158, 250, 296, 314 
Horti Caesaris, 12 n. 

Tentaculum, 270 

Im;pluvium, 241 

Institutio Oratoris (Quintilian's), 195 

Insulae, 15, 28-32, 48, 237 

Inventione, De (Cicero's), 110, 195 

Isis, worship of, 322 

lura, 138 

Ius civile, 324 

Ius divinum, 286, 323, 324 

Ius gentium, in 

Janiculum, the, 4 

Janus, "temple" of, 20 

Julius Obsequens, 344 

Juno, temple of, 17 

Jupiter, 291, 321, 337 ff. 

Jupiter Farreus, 136 ; Julius, 349 ; 
Optimus Maximus, temple of, 17, 
21, 291, 292 ; Stator, temple of, 16 

Juturna, spring of, 19 . 

" King," game of, 172, 290, 291 

Laberius, 317, 318 

Lar, 141, 193, 238, 240, 241, 242 

Lares, shrine of, 16 

Latifundium, 221, 222, 233 

Latina, Via. See Via Latina 

Latins, the, 5 

Latium, 5 

Law-courts, the, 17, 273 

Lectisternia, 333 

Lectus, 278-280 ; consularis, 279 ; 

genialis, 241 
Legibus, De (Cicero's), 253, 323, 326 



36o 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



Lentulus, 296 

Lepidus, 164 

Liberalia, the, 192 n. 

Libertinus, 224, 228 

Libertus, 224 

Liternum, Scipio's villa at, 247, 248 

Livius Andronicus, 228, 312 

Livy, 6, 9, 10, 350 

Lucretius, 109, 122, 134, 247, 326 

Lucretius Vespillo, Q., 159 fF. 

LucuUus, 111, 113 %., 124, 157, 296 

Lvdi, 288 ff. ; ApoUinares, 292, 

293, 295, 301, 306 ; Ceriales, 293, 

294, 300 ; Florales, 293, 294, 296, 
301 ; Magni, see Romani ; Mega- 
lenses, 292-294, 296, 301, 333 ; 
Novemdiales, 304 ; Plebeii, 292, 
293, 300 ; Romani, 291, 292, 294, 
296, 297, 300 ; Victoriae, 294 

Ludus Trojae, 300 
Lupercal, the, 3 
Lupercalia, the, 290 

Magister, 73 
Magna Mater, 293, 333 
Mancipes, 72 
Manes, 343 
Mangones, 211 
Manus, 136, 139, 146 
Marcius Rex, Q., 41 
Marius, 209, 226, 303 
Mars, 137, 300 ; temple of, 14 
Martial, 4 

Matrimonium, iustum, 135, 137, 138 
Megalenses, Ludi. See Ludi Mega- 
lenses 
Mensa, 279 

Mensae, 281 ; rationes, 81 
Meridiatio, 274 
Metae, the, 14 
Metellus Celer, 155 
Metellus Macedonicus, 149, 150 
Milo, 131, 221 
Mimes, 316-318 
Minerva, temple of, 17, 46 
Missio in bona, 57 
Missus, 301 
Molo, 199 
Mommsen, 9, 262 
Money-lenders, 56, 57, 60, 80 ff. 
Moretum ("Virgil's"), 32, 33 and n. 
Mos majorum, 324, 325 
Muliones, 55 
Munera, 302 ff. 

m/as, 324 

JVegotiatores, 26, 70, 80 ff. 

Negotium,, 69 



Nepos, Cornelius, 63, 64, 111 
Neptunalia, the, 289, 290 
Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, 209 
Novemdiales, Ludi, See Ludi Novem- 

diales 
Novus homo, 99 
Numa, 45 
Nummularii, 81 

Obaerati, 219 

Oecus, 242, 244 

Officiis, De (Cicero's), 115, 296 

Operarii, 218 

Opifices, 44, 46 

Oppia, lex, 147 

Oppius Mons, 16 n. 

Oratore, De (Cicero's), 110, 314 

Ordo equester, 15, 26, 60 ff., 97, 310 ; 

senatorius, 26, 60, 97 ff. 
scans, the, 6 
Ostia, 5-7, 55 
Ovid, 154, 289, 309 

Pacuvius, 305 

Palatine hill, 3, 4, 15, 25 

Palliatae, fabulae. See Fabulae 

palliatae 
Panaetius, 106, 114-116, 334 
Pantomimus, 318 
Participes, 73 
Patronus, 269 
Paullus, L. Aemilius, 100, 101, 104, 

207, 322 
Pauperculi, 219 
Peculium, 233 
Penates, the, 30, 238, 241, 242; 

temple of the, 16 
Pergamum, 213 

Peristylium, 242-244, 254, 255, 278 
Permutatio, 82 
Pero, 54 

Perscriptio, 82 n. 
Persona, 222, 224 
Phaedrus the Epicurean, 199 
Philippi, battle of, 346 
Philippus (tribune), 212 
Philo the Academician, 199 
Philodemus, 123 
Pietas, 320 

Piso, Calpurnius, 123, 280 
Pistores, 48, 49 
Plaetoria, lex, 266 
Plautus, 50, 305 

Plebeii, Ludi. See Ludi Plebeii 
Pliny, the elder, 268 ; the younger, 

112 
Plutarch, 171, 190 
PoUio, Asinius, 111 n. 



INDEX 



361 



Polybius, 72, 105, 106, 114, 175, 190 
Pomerium, the, 15 n. 
Pompeii, 49, 254, 258, 267 
Pompeius, 75, 78, 88, 102, 124, 208, 

209, 291, 306 ; house of, 25 ; theatre 

of, 22 
Pomponia, 152, 153 
Pons Aemilius, 4, 12 
Ponte Rotto, 4 n. 
Pontifex Maximus, 16, 19, 136, 323, 

326 
Porta Capena, 14, 15 ; Carmentalis, 

3, 22 ; Esquilina, 20 
Portunus, 13 

Posidonius, 115, 116, 332, 335, 338 
Praecia, 157 
Praedes, 73 
Fraediola, 254 
Praetor, the, 57, 126 
Pravdium, 273, 274 
Priesthoods, 324 ff. 
Promagister, 73, 78 
Pronuba, 142 

Provinces, +he, 67, 72, 73, 76-79, 95 
Provocationis, ius, 138 n. 
Ptolemy Auletes, 91 
PnbUcani, 26, 69, 70 
Publicum, 69 

Publilius Syrus, 184, 228, 317, 318 
Punic wars, 12 
Puteoli, Cicero's villa at, 257 
Puticulus, 320 
Pythagoreanism, 347 

Quaestiones Conviviales (Plutarch's), 

279 
Quaestorship, the, 97 
Quintilian, 198 

Quirinal (hill), 4, 18, 24, 25, 243 
Quirinus, 137 

Rabirius Postumus, 90 ff. 

Pedemptor, 218 

Regia, the, 3 p.., 16, 19 

Religio, 319 ff. 

Religion, 319 ff. 

RepeUmdis, quaestio de, 61, 92, 126 

MepuUiea, De (Cicero's), 175, 347 

Res, 223, 224 ; mancipi, 223 

Rex, the, 16 

Rex sacrorum, 137 

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 110 

Romulus, 10 

Roscius, the actor, 314, 315 

Rostra, the, 19, 264 

Rutilius, 111, 116, 303 

Sabines, the, 13 



Saccarii, 55 

Sacra, 136 ; privata, 320 ; publica, 

320 ; via, see Via Sacra 
St. Peter, church of, 22 
Salaminians, the, 125 
Sallust, 111, 156, 243, 350, 351 
Samnium, 6 

San Gregorio, Via di, 15 
Sarpedon, 172 
Sassia, 157, 158 
Saturnalia, the, 288, 290, 291 
Saturninus, 37, 225, 226 
Saturnus, temple of, 20 
Scaevola, Mucins, 116, 118, 119, 296, 

323, 326 
Scaurus, 296 
Scipio Aemilianus, 104-106, 227, 248 ; 

Asiaticus, 66, 295 ; Nasica, 310 
Sempionia, 156 
Senate, the, 97 ff., 273, 310 
Senatorius, ordo. See Ordo senatorius 
Seneca, 112 
"Servian wall," 24 
Servilius, 132 
Sibylline books, the, 333 
Slaves, 11, 47, 48, 59, 204 ff., 278, 280, 

290, 298 n. 
Societates publicanorum, 70 ff. 
Socii, 72 

Sodalicia, collegia. See Collegia 
Soleae, 281 

Somnium Scipionis (Cicero's), 348 
Spanish silver mines, 66 
Spartacus, 221 
Spina, 301 
Sponsalia, 140 n. 
Sportula, 269 
Stoics, the, 27, 43, 114-117, 176, 332, 

334 ff. 
Stola matronalis, 144 
Strabo, 6 

Subma, the, 18 and »., 25, 26 
Suffragii, ius, 138 n. 
Sulla, 37, 38, 57, 75, 111, 124, 226, 

228, 294, 345 
Sulla, P., 226 
Sulpicius (S.), Rufus, 118-121, 134, 

261 
Sun-dials, 264, 265 
Supplicationes, 333 
Synthesis, 281 

Tabellarii, 74 
Tabernae, 19, 31 n. 
Tabernae argentariae, 80 
Tdblinum, 241, 242, 244, 255 
Tabulae, 83 
Tabulae novae, 57 



362 



SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME 



Tabularia, the, 17, 20, 193 

Tepidarium, 244, 255, 275 

Terence, 228, 305 

Terentia, 150-152 

Theatre, the, 305 ff. 

Theatre, building of a, 309 ff. 

Thurii, 221 

Tiber, 2, 4, 5, 6, 12 

Tiber island, 12 

Tibicines, 309 n. 

Tibur, 41 

Time, divisions of, in the day, 266 

Tiro (Cicero's slave), 82, 151 n., 200, 

223 
Tirocinium fori, 194 
Titus, arch of, 16 
Toga, 151 ; libera, 193 ; praetexta, 

141, 192 ; virilis, 191 
Togatae, fabulae. See Fabulae togatae 
Tragedy, 305 ff. 
Tributum, 67 
Triclinia, 278-280 
Triumph, a, 21 
Trofei di Mario, 42 
Tullia (Cicero's daughter), 120, 140, 

259, 348 
Tullianum, the, 20 
Tunica, 51 

Turia, tl. . story of, 159 ff. 
Tusculum, Cicero's villa at, 251, 252 
Tiaela, 139, 162 
Tutor 139 
Twelve Tables, the, 179, 180, 264 n. 



Usus, 138 

Valerius Maximus, 172, 189 

Varro, 93, 112, 116, 175, 177, 209, 

210, 219, 221, 222, 232, 260, 261, 

274, 281 n., 321, 333, 335 ff. 
Varro, Terentius (consul), 44 
Veii 9 

Velabrum, the, 13, 18, 22 
Velia, the, 16 
Venationes, 312 
Venus Victrix, temple of, 311 
Verres 73 
Vesta,' 19, 238, 241, 242, 321 ; temple 

of, 16, 18, 19 
Vestal Virgins, 19 
Veterans, Roman, 11 
Via Aurelia, 4 ; Appia, 14, 258 ; 

Collatina, 41 ; Latina, 14 ; Sacra, 

16, 17, ]8, 21, 245, 292 
Victoriae, Ludi. See Ludi Victoriae 
Vicus Tuscus, 18, 22 
Vilicus, 217, 233, 278 
Villa pseudurbana, 254 
Vinalia, the, 39 
Vindicta, 224 
Virgil, 2, 9, 10, 188, 304, 325, 341-343, 

351 
Voconia, lex, 147 

■Water-clocks, introduction of, 264, 
265 



THE END 




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